Is there an American face? If there is, it began to form when those stern-visaged English Puritans landed in New England and improvised arrangements with the rocky, forested land and the population of native Americans, as they have come to be, correctly, called. A few so-called Indians have made it into the National Portrait Gallery's forthcoming exhibition Americans, painted and photographed by palefaces whose ethnography was animated by a rueful awareness that the vanquished race and its ruddy, unsmiling warriors embodied something - a shadowy history, a patient lifestyle - lost when Europeans invaded the continent. An Indian stoicism invaded the European faces; the frontier was a hard place, demanding of its settlers practical resolve and ascetic virtue.
We find in these portraits little of the pampered cheek and arrogant downward glance of English aristocrats as rendered by Van Dyck and Gainsborough, and little of the robust lower-class jollity recorded by the genre painters of the Lowlands. Dickens, in his American Notes of 1842, wrote of my fellow countrymen: "I was quite oppressed by the prevailing seriousness and melancholy air of business: which was so general and unvarying, that at every new town I came to, I seemed to meet the very same people whom I had left behind me, at the last. Such defects as are perceptible in the national manners, seem, to me, to be referable, in a great degree, to this cause: which has generated a dull, sullen persistence in coarse usages, and rejected the graces of life as undeserving of attention."
The first American that Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit meets in the New World is indeed unprepossessing: "a sallow gentleman, with sunken cheeks, black hair, small twinkling eyes", wearing "a mixed expression of vulgar cunning and conceit". Americans took root by an effort of will; they came to make themselves anew, and high hopes and practical shifts narrowed their faces, perhaps, to a certain fierceness - see the portraits of John C Calhoun and William T Sherman, for example. Or John Brown's photographed glare, a contrast with Lincoln's weary smile.
The laborious settlement of the endless territories, the bloody war to purge slavery from the American system, the ascent of industrialism with its wage slavery - these worked to keep our expressions stern, though, as with peoples everywhere, moments of joy, of song, of love, of family cherishing lightened the travail of living.
A dominant Calvinism minimised the "graces of life", while, paradoxically, it esteemed worldly prosperity as a hint of heavenly election. Enterprise was given a blessing, and the freedom to extend itself as best it could.
And yet what could be more dandified than John Singleton Copley's languid, red-lipped, silver-haired self-portrait, or Charles Sprague Pearce's profile of his fellow Parisian artist Paul Wayland Bartlett? Expatriatism in Europe created a tribe of hyper-aesthetic Americans who lived pleasantly on their strong dollars and helped hatch modernism. In this exhibition, the portraits that could be called iconic are of Franklin and Washington, engraved versions of which are enshrined on our paper currency; they remind us that the United States was the political creation of the 18th-century Enlightenment, embodying its liberated thinking and realistic appraisal of human nature.
By the 20th century, popular culture promoted the spread of images of elegance and sensuality. Movies out of Hollywood, on a new scale of art manufacture, flickered above the formerly dull and gloomy citizenry; we are left with stills of Greta Garbo's unfocused gaze, Audrey Hepburn's focused one, Louis Armstrong's laugh and Marilyn Monroe's rising skirt. Lena Horne, Michael Jackson, Lincoln Kirstein, Thomas Hart Benton and his wife - their painted portraits attain a certain Apollonian grandeur, built of all-American materials.
The native Puritanism lingers, perhaps, as an air we might call spiritual: such grave and distinguished portraits as those by Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent strive, like the heads of medieval statuary, to read a soul into the human visage, and seem to offer a judgment, not merely a depiction, of their subjects.
© John Updike, 2002. This article is an extract from Americans, published by the National Portrait Gallery at £12.95 to accompany its exhibition Americans: Paintings and Photographs from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC . The exhibition runs from October 10 to January 12. Details: 020-7312 2463.