The 18th Century

The 18th Century The 18th Century

With the turn of the 18th century, the colonies began to take on a more permanent and established character, as the hardships of the wilderness were overcome, and increasing commerce and production permitted the growth of prosperous cities. Newly founded cities, such as Williamsburg, Virginia, Annapolis, Maryland, and especially Philadelphia, were laid out on a regular grid, with public squares-the kind of logical organization that had eluded planners in London during the same period. In contrast, cities founded in the 17th century, such as Boston, remain to this day chaotic in plan.

Architects also began to employ more current styles, following contemporaneous English practice in larger and much more ambitious buildings. The so-called Wren Building (begun 1695) at William and Mary College, in Williamsburg, with its symmetry and central pediment; the Capitol (1699-1705), in Williamsburg; and the Philadelphia Courthouse (1709) are modest versions of London's early baroque styles. The publication of the work of leading English architects such as James Gibbs made it possible for colonial builders and architects to design such sophisticated churches as Christ Church (1727-44), in Philadelphia, and the impressive Saint Michael's (1751-53), in Charleston, South Carolina, with its distinctive portico.

The first quarter of the 18th century is represented in domestic architecture by the McPhedris-Warner House (1718-23), in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, two rooms deep with a central-stair hall. Around midcentury, country houses were designed in the English Palladian style, featuring compact two-story or three-story buildings dominated by a central portico, with the principal rooms often raised to the second floor. An early example is Drayton Hall (1738) near Charleston. Important public buildings were also treated in the Palladian style, as was the Pennsylvania Hospital (begun 1754) in Philadelphia.

As the 18th century began, artists were active in several parts of the colonies. Henrietta Johnston (active 1705-29), the first American woman artist, worked in Charleston, executing the earliest pastel portraits. But the most active school of painting was in the Hudson River valley, where the major landholders, or patroons, required portraits for their Dutch-style manor houses. The semitrained artists produced relatively flat images with little control of modeling, basing their compositions, including the elaborate backgrounds, on English prints. The school culminated in the monumental full-length portraits Pieter Schuyler (circa 1719, City Hall, Albany, New York) and Ariandtje Schoomans (circa 1717, Albany Institute of History and Art), imposing in their almost iconic quality.

As the century advanced, artists with more training began to immigrate to the colonies. The most important was John Smibert, a successful London portraitist working in the school of the English portraitists Sir Godfrey Kneller and Thomas Hudson. Smibert settled in Boston in 1729.

By 1750 the pace of artistic activity had picked up considerably, with many more artists working than before. The talented native-born portraitist Robert Feke was Smibert's principal successor in New England, modifying Smibert's bulky manner with a heightened sense of line and surface design. Other leading artists were Joseph Blackburn (active in America 1753-64) in New England, John Wollaston (active c. 1734-67) in New York and the mid-Atlantic colonies, and Jeremiah Theusin Charleston.

Two major artists of international significance emerged shortly after midcentury, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. Trained in Philadelphia, West left for Italy and England in late 1759, becoming dean of the English neoclassical school and president of the Royal Academy. To his studio in London he welcomed a generation of American art students, among them the portraitist Gilbert Stuart. Copley was reared in Boston. His talents developed rapidly in the early 1760s, and he brought colonial portraiture to entirely new levels of realism and psychological depth. His finest American works are marked by an almost obsessive literalness, supported by a mastery in the rendering of light and textures. Copley's work during the decade before his departure (1774) for England represents the apex of painting in the colonial period.

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