“Natural Art”  in England and America

Across the Channel, a truly English style of painting emerged with William Hogarth (1697-1764), who satirized the lifestyle of the newly prosperous middle class with comic zest. Although Hogarth would have been the last to admit it, his paintings owed much to the works of his contemporaries in France, the Rococo artists. Yet his subject matter, frequently moral in tone, was distinctively English. The Tête à Tête, from Marriage à la Mode, is one in a sequence of six paintings satirizing the marital immoralities of the moneyed classes in England. In it, the marriage of a young viscount is just beginning to founder. The husband and wife are tired after a long night spent in separate pursuits. While the wife stayed home for an evening of cards and music-making, her young husband had been away from the house enjoying the company of another woman. He thrusts his hands deep into the empty money-pockets of his breeches, while his wife’s small dog sniffs inquiringly at the other woman’s lacy cap protruding from his coat pocket. A steward, his hands full of unpaid bills, raises his eyes in despair at the actions of his noble master and mistress.

A contrasting blend of “naturalistic” representation and Rococo setting is found in Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, a characteristic portrait by British painter Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Gainsborough presented Mrs. Sheridan as a lovely, informally dressed woman seated in a rustic landscape faintly reminiscent of Watteau in its soft-hued light and feather brushwork. Gainsborough’s goal was to match the natural, unspoiled beauty of the landscape with that of his sitter. Mrs. Sheridan’s dark brown hair blows freely in the slight wind, and her clear “English complexion” and air of ingenuous sweetness contrast sharply with the pert sophistication of the subjects of Continental Rococo portraits. Gainsborough planned to give the picture a more pastoral air by adding several sheep, but he did not live long enough to complete the canvas. Even without the sheep, the painting clearly expresses Gainsborough’s deep interest in the landscape setting.

American artist John Singleton Copley matured as a painter in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. He emigrated to England, where he absorbed the fashionable English portrait style. Copley’s Paul Revere, painted before the artist left Boston, conveys a sense of directness and faithfulness to visual fact that marked the taste for honesty and plainness noted by many late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century visitors to America.

When Copley painted his likeness, Revere was not yet the familiar hero of the American Revolution. In this picture, he is a working professional silversmith. The setting is plain, the lighting clear and revealing. Revere sits in his shirtsleeves, bent over a teapot in progress. He pauses and turns his head to look the observer straight in the eyes. The painter treated the reflections in the polished wood of the tabletop with as much care as he did Revere’s figure, his tools, and the teapot resting on its leather graver’s pillow. Copley gave special prominence to Revere’s eyes by reflecting intense reddish light onto the darkened side of his face and hands. The informality and the sense of the moment link this painting to contemporaneous English and Continental portraits. But the spare style and the emphasis on the sitter’s down-to-earth character differentiate this American work from its European counterparts.^[1]