Republic of Taste. Catherine E. Kelly

Peale, foreign and nativeborn artists had by the 1790s “become so numerous that I cannot undertake to make any account of them.” Looking to supplement their incomes, these men (and a few women) established drawing academies whose hours were carefully coordinated with the schedules of surrounding seminaries. For example, James Cox, who operated a “Drawing and Painting Academy” in New York and Philadelphia, taught “ladies” from 2 until 4 and “gentlemen” from 4 until 6, beginning his classes at precisely the time that students would have been released from their other studies. In a gesture of respect for the social distinctions prized by his patrons, he offered a separate “Evening School” to attract “gentlemen” who worked during the day. Although it is impossible to know how many students, male or female, attended schools like Cox’s, the number of drawing masters who sought their patronage suggests that there must have been a steady demand for their services.⁶⁰

      If both sexes studied aesthetics and some form of fine arts, they did not study in quite the same way or toward quite the same ends. The most obvious differences derive from conventions governing the gender division of labor: A young woman would have been very likely to produce a piece of ornamental needlework, something ranging from an alphabetic sampler to a large, embroidered picture; a young man would never have plied a needle. While a young woman might have chosen classes in fancy needlework or drawing, she might also have chosen to learn calligraphy, painting, japanning, waxwork, or worsted work; a young man learned to draw. A young woman with the inclination and the financial resources might have opted to pursue some form of “the ornamentals” throughout her school years; a young man typically relinquished his drawing class in favor of more focused attention on the classics or branches of English and mathematics that might serve useful in commerce. But gender also shaped the kinds of art that young women and men produced as well as its meaning.

      Figure 6. “Autumn,” illustration from James Thomson, The Seasons: With the Castle of Indolence (1804). Library Company of Philadelphia.

      Figure 7. Needlework picture depicting Palemon and Lavinia, created by Sarah Ann Hanson while she attended the Moravian Seminary for Young Ladies in Litiz, PA. Pictorial embroidery of silk, chenille, spangles, paint, and ink. Private collection; photograph courtesy of Old Salem Museum and Gardens.

      Figure 8. Embroidered picture of Mount Vernon, ca. 1807, made by Caroline Stebbins when she was a student at Deerfield Academy. Her father paid $5 (the equivalent of a half year’s tuition) to have the embroidery framed. Silk on silk, 13¼ × 16⅞ in. Courtesy of Memorial Hall Museum, Deerfield, MA.

      The pedagogical and thematic parallels between young women’s book learning and their “ornamental” studies are arresting. Both were structured by emulation, by the belief that in copying appropriate models, students might transcend mere mimicry and internalize the style and substance of their betters. Students’ commonplace books and journals might have included their own observations, poetry, and even drawings. But they were largely devoted to “improving” extracts transcribed from published sermons, essays, poetry, and conduct and letter-writing manuals.⁶¹ Their painted and embroidered pictures were based on popular prints, usually selected by their teachers and produced in a style specified by—and identified with—those same teachers.⁶² The arts, in fact, were believed to be especially useful for inculcating the habit of emulation in young women. Thus, when one young woman turned up her nose at the ornamentals offered by the Bethlehem Female Seminary, her guardian was dismayed. “Her unwillingness to undertake any of the ornamental branches, shews her totally devoid of that emulation, without which nothing can be acquired almost induces me to believe that she is not compos mentis,” he fumed. Never mind that the girl displayed “no taste for the arts”: the arts fostered the habits demanded by other branches of study. “I want her mind exercised by every possible means,” he continued, demanding that the girl be kept at “worsted work as long as you can control her” and that she begin drawing lessons immediately. This, he hoped, “may prove the inception to other undertakings, which may diminish if not destroy” the girl’s “indolence of mind.”⁶³

      It was not just the process of emulation that linked literary and ornamental work. It was also the sort of original that female students copied. The same themes and turns of phrase that young women recorded in commonplace books and schoolgirl essays to demonstrate their mastery of polite letters were embroidered on samplers. Inscriptions testifying to women’s religious faith and practice dominated both media. But samplers, like commonplace books, also testified to young women’s participation in the transatlantic community of letters that shored up the republic of taste. If quotations from Isaac Watts were especially popular, girls also selected verse from Pope, Goldsmith, and Cowper. With needle and pen, girls praised nature, whose “beauteous works” when “fitly drawn” “please the eye and the aspireing mind/To nobler scenes of pleasure more refined.” They yearned for immortal friendships that might “outlive … the stars survive … the tomb.” Anticipating death, young women anticipated the passing of time, youth, and beauty. In prose and embroidered inscription, they reminded themselves that only virtue and intellect withstood the test of time. As one young woman put it, “Rear’d by blest Education’s nurturing hand/Behold the maid arise her mind expand/Deep in her heart the seeds of virtue lay/Maturing age shall give them to the day.” Or, in the words of another, “Beauty will soon fade away,/But learning never will decay.” All of these lines, culled from late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century samplers, could as easily have been drawn from copybooks from the same period.⁶⁴

      Literary themes and print culture more generally also dominated young women’s pictorial embroidery and their paintings. The characters and plots of much-loved books, mediated by imported, engraved prints, provided scores of young women with fodder for needles and paintbrushes. Many students, for example, worked from illustrations from James Thomson’s perennially popular book of verse, The Seasons. Following the lead of British painters and engravers, teachers and “schoolgirl” artists were especially keen to reproduce the plate for “Autumn,” which showed the gentleman Palemon confessing his love to rustic Lavinia. Others favored themes that infused polite culture with civic duty and nationalism. In 1804, a student named Mary Beach created a large needlework copy of a Francesco Bartolozzi engraving taken from Angelica Kauffman’s painting of Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi. Cornelia was a figure revered in the early republic for her eloquence as well as her maternal strength. By choosing Cornelia, Beach (or, more likely, her teacher) simultaneously signaled her republican commitments and her familiarity with the cosmopolitan world of engraved prints. Similar sentiments were at work in the many pieces of art honoring George Washington. Elaborate renditions of prints depicting the Washington family were common subjects. Washington’s death in 1799 predictably prompted an outpouring of mourning art. Even Mount Vernon attracted its share of attention from academy instructors and their students.⁶⁵

      Whatever they depicted, these images were created explicitly for display. The paintings and embroideries created by female students were generally framed, often at great expense. One Connecticut man recalled that any young woman who had attended an academy was “expected to bring home … some evidence of proficiency in her studies. Those who could, exhibited elaborate water color drawings which have hung ever since on the walls of … [local] Parlors.” In fact, the imperative to display girls’ accomplishments was so strong that frame-making began to employ significant numbers of artisans when and where schoolgirls began to make art.⁶⁶

      It is far harder to generalize about the artistic work of boys and young men, if only because so little of it has survived. That, in and of itself, is suggestive. Whatever happened to those drawings and paintings, they were not encased in expensive frames, hung up in family parlors, or passed lovingly from one generation to the next. They were never, in other words, intended for display outside the walls of the academy. But the short life of the final product (pictures) does not mean that the process (learning to draw) was unimportant. On the contrary. Thomas Jefferson took