For one brief moment in the late sixteenth century, European art flared faintly on the shores of the Virginia colony. Among the stalwarts of Raleigh's 'Second Colonie' that clutched for a foothold on the new continent in 1585 was John White (Johannes Wyth), later to become Virginia's second governor (1587-90) and the grandfather of Virginia Dare. The water-color drawings made in 1585-86 by this 'English paynter . . . sent into the countrye by the queenes Maiestye, onlye to draw the description of the place' and 'to describe the shapes of the Inhabitants their Apparell, manners of Livinge, and fashions . . .' were 'cutt in copper' and issued by Theodore de Bry in 1590 to illustrate John Hariot's Narrative. From the 18 drawings still in existence it is evident that White attempted to produce a full pictorial account of the life of the aborigines.
Handicrafts were the only native art of seventeenth-century Virginia. Hardly a year after the founding of Jamestown, Sir Christopher Newport brought to the colony a number of Dutch and Polish glassmakers. The industry continued to the 'Starving Time,' when it languished and finally became extinct. In 1621 Captain William Norton and four skilled Italians, in a second attempt at glassmaking, produced chiefly beads for Indian trade until the enterprise was wiped out by the massacre of 1622. During the next decades such crafts as cobbling, tanning, weaving, and pottery making were carried on.
The 'Artickles of Agreemt' between Dennis Whit and Morgan Jones in 1667 probably contain the earliest reference to Virginia pottery: 'a condicon or agreemt for to be copartners for ye term of five years in making and selling of Earthen warre . . .' With the growth of population toward the turn of the century-from some 40,000 in 1670 to about 70,000 in 1700-handicrafts increased.
The fine arts developed more slowly. Though art was appreciated from the beginning, as indicated by the early importation of British paintings and objets d'art, a number of factors hindered local creation. Prosperous Virginians remained, as a rule, intensely loyal to the British Crown, regarding the mother country as their real home; even the gentlemen who flocked to Virginia after the fall of Charles I in 1649 endeavored to transmit the English tradition to their children and frequently sent their sons 'home' to be educated. Nor was social life on the widely scattered plantations-with an occasional trip to fashionable Williamsburg-of the kind to stimulate native artistic activity.
During the eighteenth century, however, visiting artists were attracted to the colony. Charles Bridges, who arrived in Williamsburg in May 1734 is the first known professional painter in Tidewater Virginia. Having done portraits of the Byrd children 'and several others in the neighborhood,' the artist in 1735 received from William Byrd II a letter of introduction to Governor Spotswood that resulted in several important commissions. Bridges flourished in the colony until about I 750 and, like most of his contemporaries, did various types of decoration in addition to portrait painting. In 1740, 1,600 pounds of tobacco were sold by Caroline County to pay Bridges 'for drawing the King's Arms for the use of the County Court.' In 1743 Alexander Gordon (1692-1754) came from England to Virginia, where he combined painting with the professions of musician and teacher of languages.
The Swedish painter Gustavus Hesselius (1682-1755), one of America's most noted art pioneers, had settled in Delaware and traveled through coastal Virginia, painting portraits rich in character and individuality. His son John (1728-78) also did portraits for prominent Virginia families. Between the years 1758 and 1767 an Englishman, John Wollaston, Jr., executed in Virginia many portraits in a style suggestive of Kneller, though he gave his sitters rather puffy hands and eyes with so peculiar a slant toward the nose that critics dubbed him 'The Almond Eyed Artist.' Henry Warren, another 'limner,' is known only by an advertisement in the Virginia Gazette in 1768 that announced his establishment in Williamsburg and his readiness to paint 'night pieces' and 'family pieces.'
The many portraits painted in Virginia between 1764 and 1775 by the Huguenot, John Durand, another of the group that traveled from town to town earning a precarious livelihood, are hard and dry, though of pleasing color and, as Robert Sully reflected, 'with less vulgarity of style than artists of his calibre generally possess.' Henry Benbridge (1744-1812), a Philadelphian with European training, settled in South Carolina upon his return from London in 1770 and radiated over the Southern field, executing many portraits, family groups, and an occasional deft miniature. In 1799 youthful Thomas Sully discovered Benbridge hard at work in Norfolk. In order to acquire a knowledge of oil painting, Sully sat for his portrait and profited by Benbridge's 'useful and kind instruction.'
To this group of eighteenth-century portraitists belong also Robert Edge Pine (1730-88), an Englishman who painted Washington at Mount Vernon in 1785, and William Williams (1759-1823), a New York portraitist who toured the South working in oil, pastel, and miniature. In 1793, the Masonic Lodge in Alexandria, having received President Washington into the order, commissioned Williams, then living in Philadelphia, to 'paint him as he is,' and the result was a somewhat inartistic pastel portrait (now in Alexandria) that is, perhaps, a good likeness. Williams also executed a portrait of 'Light Horse Harry' Lee. Of 'Manley, Taylor, Frazier, and Caine,' mentioned by William Dunlap as painters who worked in Virginia during this time, nothing is known except that Frazier's works kindled in Charles Willson Peale the ambition to paint.
During the early Republican period, roughly from 1783 to 1820, Colonial portraiture gave way before the influence of the classicist Benjamin West (1738-1820), whose school in London was attended by many post-Revolutionary American artists. Foremost among West's pupils was versatile Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827), who had worked as a saddler and at many other trades. On a trip to Norfolk to buy leather, he was so much impressed by the paintings of 'a certain Frazier' that on his return to Maryland he took up the study of art with John Hesselius at Annapolis. In 1766 he entered West's studio. While living in London, he obtained through his friends in Maryland the commission to paint the full length portrait of Lord Chatham that Edmond Jennings sent to Virginia as a gift to the 'Gentlemen of Westmoreland County.' Returning to America in 1769, Peale executed many portraits, group compositions, miniatures, and silhouettes of Virginians and in 1772 painted at Mount Vernon his most notable portrait-that of George Washington in the costume of a colonel in the Virginia militia.
Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), foremost painter of the young republic and renowned for his many portraits of Washington, established himself at the new National capital from 1803 to 1805; among his sitters were John Randolph of Roanoke, James and Dolly Madison, and Colonel John Tayloe and his wife, of Mount Airy and the Octagon House.
Among the later group of West's pupils who worked in Virginia were William Dunlap (1766-1839) and Thomas Sully (1783-1872). Dunlap, author of the History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, painted many portraits in Virginia during the winters of 1819-21. At 16 Sully, who was born in England but brought up in Charleston, S.C., joined his brother Lawrence, who was painting miniatures in Norfolk. Later, he obtained instruction from Fraser, the miniaturist, and from Benbridge and West. His numerous portraits of Virginians, particularly residents of Petersburg and Richmond, were done during the period stretching from 1804 to about 1855 and are representative of his fluent, easy style.
The surge of classicism that produced so many historical and allegorical canvases during the early Republican period received in Virginia a powerful stimulus through Thomas Jefferson's architectural designs and his enthusiasm for the study of the arts. The 'intellectual collaboration' (to quote Bernard Fay) between France and America that marked this epoch was further exemplified by the founding in Richmond in 1786 of the Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts of the United States of America, the first institution of its kind in the new country, by the visionary Chevalier Quesnay de Beaurepaire. With funds subscribed in Virginia and elsewhere, Beaurepaire erected a building near Capitol Square. The project, however, came to naught-the building was burned, and the Chevalier himself was swept into the vortex of the French Revolution. In 1785 the French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828), commissioned by the legislature to execute a statue of Washington, arrived at Mount Vernon; he made a life mask and painstaking measurements of Washington. At the end of the year he returned to France and began work on the magnificent marble statue-probably the most celebrated in the United States-which was placed in the rotunda of the State capitol in 1796.
Between 1808 and 1811, Felix Sharples, son of the English pastel painter James Sbarples, executed pastels in Norfolk, Suffolk, and many of the Tidewater counties. As security for money borrowed, he left in the State a large collection of pastels by himself and other members of his family, which formed the nucleus of the Sharples Collection in Independence Hall. The French emigre, Julien Fevret de Saint-Memin (1770-1852), came to Richmond during the Aaron Burr trial in 1807, when the town was crowded with important personages. He remained not quite a year, producing-with the aid of a machine called a physionotrace-profile drawings in crayon and white chalk; Saint-Memin's delicate miniature engravings were made by reducing these drawings on copper plates with a pantograph. John Wesley Jarvis (1780-1839), Anglo-American portrait and miniature painter, made seasonal trips to the cities and estates south of Baltimore during the early decades of the nineteenth century.
Local artists of Richmond at this time were Philip A. Peticolas (1760-1843), copyist and painter of miniatures, and James Warrell, an Englishman, who in 1812 was offering his services to the citizens 'as a Portrait Painter in Oil.' Among Warrell's canvases was the Sena Soma, or the Sword Swallower, now at the Valentine Museum. In 1814 he designed Peter Francisco's Gallant Action . . . in Amelia County, Virginia, later engraved by D.Edwin. In 1816 Warrell, with Richard Lorton, a Petersburg artist, aided in establishing in Richmond a museum of art and natural science known as the Virginia Museum. Music and displays of fireworks were used to entice the public to the museum, where paintings were exhibited among a miscellaneous collection of objets d'art. Here were shown a group of Gilbert Stuart's portraits and John Vanderlyn's Ariadne, the first study of a nude unveiled publicly in Richmond.
Between the War of 1812 and the middle of the century the English tradition in portraiture survived in the work of English-born William J. Hubard (1807-62), Edward F. Peticolas, and Robert M. Sully (1803-55), nephew of Thomas Sully. In 1829, Chester Harding (1792-1866) exhibited in Richmond his 'portraits of many distinguished men,' to which he added those of several Richmonders.
With the expansion of commerce and the growth of National sentiment, American landscapes and scenes from everyday life found their way into local painting. Foremost among the genre painters was George Caleb Bingham (1811-79), who was born in Augusta County but worked mainly in Missouri. Bingham's paintings constitute a record of the domestic and political life of the frontier. His later work shows the influence of the anecdotal school of Dusseldorf in Germany, to which American painters had begun to turn for instruction.
The name Hudson River School has been applied to a loosely defined indigenous movement in landscape painting. In this tradition worked William Louis Sontag (1822-1900), a Pennsylvanian, whose Morning in the Alleghanies is representative of his many landscapes of western Virginia. Views of Mount Vernon, a popular subject, were painted by William Henry Bartlett (1809-94).
The paintings inspired by the War between the States are linked artistically with the impulse to record local scenes and events. John A. Elder (1833-95), who had studied at Dusseldorf under Emmanuel Leutze, settled in Richmond, where he painted battle scenes and portraits of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Conrad Wise Chapman (1842-1910), born in Washington, D.C. and brought up in Rome, came to the South during the war, entered the army, and, while attached to General Beauregard's forces at Charleston, S.C., was detailed to make paintings of the city's fortifications. He produced 31 canvases (now at the Confederate Museum, Richmond), of which Sunset Gun, Fort Sumter is the most beautiful. E.L. Henry (1841-1919), James Hope (1818-92), Sandford R. Gifford (1823-80), and David Blythe (1815-65) depicted military operations in the region of the Potomac.
The Hudson River School broadened under the influence of the French Barbizon group with its subjective poetic interpretations of landscape. Robert Loftin Newman (1827-1912), born at Louisa, exemplifies this later phase of nineteenth-century American painting. After studying in Paris under Couture, and absorbing the Barbizon style, he returned to America to paint landscapes distinguished for their color harmonies. Benjamin West Clinedinst (1859-1931) was born near Woodstock and after a period of study in Paris executed many portraits and genre paintings. Elliott Daingerfield (1859-1932), born at Harpers Ferry, came early under the Barbizon influence and achieved wide recognition as a landscapist and figure painter. Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, society painter, was a resident of Albemarle County and died in Charlottesville in 1936.
A number of native Virginia painters have done most of their work outside the State. Carle John Blenner (b. 1864) whose work is primarily in portraiture, was born in Richmond, studied in Germany and France, and now lives in New York. F.Graharn Cootes (b. 1879), New York painter and illustrator, was born in Staunton. A native of Petersburg, Jerome Myers (b. 1867) is among the leaders of modem realism in American painting; he works in a variety of media, specializing in New York street scenes. Hugh Henry Breckenridge (b. 1870), whose paintings are to be seen in many prominent institutions throughout the country, was born in Leesburg and trained in Paris. He has been an instructor at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts since 1894.
On the other hand, several artists from other sections have incorporated themselves into Virginia life. Gari Melchers (1860-1932), outstanding Detroit-born artist, settled at Falmouth after working in Dusseldorf, Paris, and Holland, where he did many admirable studies of Dutch peasants. While on a visit to America to execute murals, he was attracted by the color and local types of the Virginia mountains and made his home in the State until his death, taking part in the establishment of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and in other art activities. Born in New York, W. Sergeant Kendall (b. 1869), a pupil of Thomas Eakins, has contributed outstanding landscapes of the Virginia scene.
The development of sculpture in Virginia began in the nineteenth century, chiefly under the domination of the Italian School. One of Virginia's first sculptors was Alexander Galt (1827-63), a native of Norfolk who studied in Florence; he died before he reached artistic maturity, and many of his best works were burned during the evacuation of Richmond in 1865. Edward V. Valentine (1838-1930), of Richmond, who studied in France, Italy, and Germany, returned to his native city in 1865 and became a leading artistic influence there. His works in the State include statues of Jefferson Davis and Thomas Jefferson, a recumbent marble statue of Lee, and the figure studies, Andromache and Astyanax and The Blind Girl. Among the few examples of his work that Sir Moses Ezekiel (1844-1917), who studied in Germany, sent to his native State from his studio in the Baths of Diocletian were two statues of Jefferson, a bust of General Edward W. Nichols, and the Confederate Memorial at Arlington. After service in the War between the States and study in Paris, William Ludwell Sheppard (1833-1912), best known for his genre painting and studies of the soldiers of the Army of Northern Virginia, executed many notable statues and a bronze haut-relief, The Color Bearer. Master of a variety of media, Paris trained Augustus Lukeman (1872-1935), a native of Richmond, settled in New York, where he executed bas-reliefs, monuments, and portrait busts, including the Jefferson Davis in the Federal capitol. William Couper, who was born in Norfolk in 1853, returned from the studios of Munich and Florence and established himself in New York in 1897 as a portraitist and sculptor of busts in the modem Italian manner; he is represented in Virginia by a heroic bronze statue of Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire and a statue of Captain John Smith.
Sculptors from outside the State have contributed important monuments memorializing Virginia personalities and events. In Richmond, grouped around Houdon's busts of Washington and Lafayette in the capitol rotunda, are seven statues of Virginia-born presidents, by Charles Keck, Charles Beach, Harriet Frishmuth, Attilio Piccirilli, and F. William Sievers, a native of Indiana but long a resident of Richmond. Other sculptors with representative works in Richmond are John Frazee (1790-1852), pioneer American-born sculptor, Thomas Crawford (c.1813-57), and Randolph Rogers, all of New York; Joel Hart (1810-77), of Kentucky; and Frederick Volck. In Charlottesville is statuary by Robert 1. Aitken, Charles Keck, Karl Bitter, and Gutzon Borglum, while Williamsburg preserves Richard Hayward's eighteenth-century memorial statue of Norborne Berkeley.
Among the beginnings of graphic art in Virginia were Saint-Memin's profile engravings and his etched view of Richmond's water front-a scene also depicted in line and mezzotint by Peter Maverick (1780-1831). To this early period belong, too, Joseph Wood (1798-1852), aquatintist, and the French engraver Blouet, both of whom did views of the State penitentiary in Richmond. Thomas Sully was not above occasional commercial lithography, and John Gadsby Chapman executed some 1,400 drawings, resembling steel engravings, that served as illustrations; Benjamin West Clinedinst in the 1890's and William Ludwell Sheppard also made contributions in this field. Among etchers associated with Virginia were William Louis Sontag, Elliott Daingerfield, and James D. Smillie. The drawings and book illustrations of Dugald Stewart Walker (1884-1937), a native of Richmond who received instruction in Virginia and New York, are lavish in detail, and distinguished by an oriental richness of design. Jerome Myers captures realistically the types of New York's east side in his admirable lithographs.
The problems of readjustment that followed the War between the States impeded public activity in the arts until 1892 when the Valentine Museum was founded in Richmond to house collections in art, archeology, and anthropology. Native art was fostered by the Art Club of Richmond, organized in 1895; and in later years, by the Virginia League of Fine Arts and Handicrafts, formed in 1917 by two Richmond artists, Adele Clark and Nora Houston; and by the Academy of Sciences and Fine Arts of the United States, revived in 1930, which encourages creative work through lectures, classes, and frequent exhibitions. In Richmond, Confederate relics are housed in the Confederate Museum; a representative group of eighteenth-century portraits in the home of the Virginia Historical Society; and a large collection of contemporary paintings, statuary, and objets d'art in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, founded in 1934. The Norfolk Museum and the Bayly Museum of Fine Arts at the University of Virginia are important contributors to local art appreciation; while the specialized Mariners' Museum near Newport News contains interesting carved figureheads and a great variety of exhibits relating to maritime life. The Conservation Commission of Virginia established in 1937 the Virginia Art Index, directed by Julia Sully, for the purpose of recording all historic portraits in the State.
Today, many native artists are producing portraits, landscapes, and studies of local types and of characteristic Virginia scenes; realistic genre painting seems to be the dominant influence among the younger artists. The Negro wood-carver, Leslie Bolling (b. 1898), has produced admirable statuettes of racial types. Among those active in the graphic arts are Lois Wilcox, engraver and lithographer, and the wood engravers Charles W. Smith (b. 1893) and Julius J. Lankes (b. 1884). An attempt has also been made in recent years to revive the handicrafts. In the mountains, mission groups started in 1923 to teach weaving, rug making, needlecraft, bookbinding, cabinet making, wood carving, and allied crafts; and this work has been taken up by various schools and guilds, and by the Handicraft Projects of the Works Progress Administration. Among the flourishing potteries now in the State is the interesting James Towne Collony Pottery, which duplicates old pieces discovered during the Williamsburg and Jamestown excavations.
Interest in art seems to be growing throughout the State. Art festivals are held in many Virginia centers, and a series of exchange exhibitions has been conducted-followed in 1938 by the first All-Virginia Exhibition of paintings sent to New York City, and the inauguration of a Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Painting by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Federal Art Galleries located at Big Stone Gap, Lynchburg, Fairfax, and Richmond are contributing to the artistic education of Virginians through classes, exhibitions, and lectures. In 1938 the Negro Art Center was established in Richmond, offering, under a Negro instructor, classes in painting, wood carving, modeling, and other branches of the arts and crafts. Art departments in various colleges and flourishing summer art schools are promoting art appreciation and training Virginia's artists of tomorrow.