"Man lives by habit except when circumstances force him to do otherwise," art historian Daniel Mendelowitz reminds, "and habit directed the colonist to attempt to recreate familiar patterns of living. Each of the national groups that settled America, as soon as the barest foothold had been established in the new land, tried to duplicate its former way of life." But there were indeed circumstances that mitigated against the colonials living life as they had in the several "old countries." The colonists' foremost concern in the seventeenth and early to mid-eighteenth centuries was conquering wilderness and enduring the hardships of frontier existence. Little time or energy was left to pursue the fine arts, either as producers or collectors. What is more, the predominantly Protestant settlers from northern and western Europe, as Lloyd Goodrich succinctly points out, tended to be "more word conscious than image conscious, more verbal minded than visual minded." Especially in Puritan New England, Mendelowitz continues, "antagonism towards the arts as expressions of courtly extravagance and vanity did not provide an atmosphere conducive to artistic production. It comes therefore as something of a surprise to find artists working in America almost from the moment the continent was discovered."

It is all the more remarkable to find artists actively producing, because colonial America offered virtually none of the traditional bases of support -- no centralized government, no cultivated nobility, no royal court, no official academies, no state religion* -- in short, none of the forms of reliable patronage that sustained European artists.

Colonial artists were further handicapped by their distance from metropolitan cultural centers (even though Philadephia grew steadily to become the second largest city in the British Empire at the time of the Revolution) and professional schools. The majority of native-born talents, not surprisingly, were self-taught, and most doubled as enamelers, house painters, sign painters, carriage decorators, carpenters, and shipwrights. Standards of proficiency, such as they were, came about either in the colonial artists' imitating what Samuel M. Green calls "second-hand or second-rate sources," that is, engraved reproductions of European work or original work by a few artists of European origin and training, typically persons of limited abilities who were unable to compete successfully in their native countries.

The prevailing colonial styles in painting, for example, reveal an awareness, but far from a mastery, of the fashionable late rococo trends set by Godfrey Kneller, Peter Lely, Thomas Hudson, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and other prominent Europeans. At the same time they manifest a clearer understanding of the earlier English Tudor style, with its characteristic decorative, flat patterning, simplified shapes, and even lighting -- a mode better suited to emulation by untrained craftsmen-folk artists. This is the underpinning of the limner tradition that dominated the earliest colonial painting and bore strongly on American art well into the nineteenth century.

The principal topic of colonial painting, as it had been in predominantly Protestant and thoroughly secularized northern Europe, was portraiture. As an upper class began to emerge throughout the colonies -- planters in the South, merchants in the middle region, landowners in New York, industrialists in New England, and shipmasters from all along the Atlantic seaboard --representatives of both established wealth and the newly prosperous demanded replicas of their faces. Particularly if the artist plied handicrafts as well as painting, a "likeness maker" could have an adequate living in colonial times. The painters' status in society, however, unlike Europe, was never greatly esteemed. Boston's John Singleton Copley, probably the most accomplished and successful painter in America before the Revolution, would still write disgruntledly in the 1760s that it was "not a little mortifying that the people regarded painting no more than any useful trade, as they sometimes term it, like that of a carpenter or shoemaker."

During the War for Independence and the first years of organizing a new government -- though progress in the visual arts was interrupted -- America's character was transformed and its culture given a new direction. The greatest single factor distinguishing the early republic from the previous era was the consciousness of self-determination. Americans defined their new role with a near-fatalistic belief in the righteousness and historical necessity of the nation -- Manifest Destiny, historians would name it, as vast territories to the west were added to the original thirteen states. Art and architecture should therefore express the stability of establishment on the one hand, and the future promise of America on the other. Influential tastemakers like Thomas Jefferson saw representative government and social egalitarianism embodied not in the art forms of the Church that had been a guiding force in European society for centuries, certainly not in the ostentation of kings, but rather in the stately forms of democratic ancient Greece and republican Rome. American art entered upon an ideological preference for classic revival architecture and decorative arts and what E. P. Richardson identifies as "neoclassic realism" in painting. "The American republic was born in an age saturated in the dream of classical antiquity," Richardson notes.

Portraiture continued in the early republic as the main purpose for painting. But significantly, subject types -- even national heroes -- are typically depicted as self-reliant, unassuming individuals rather than members of an eminent ruling class. Incidentally, in the wake of both the American and French Revolutions, a similar classic revival spread over much of Europe. The aristocratic frivolity of the rococo style no longer expressed the reality of the age.

It may at first seem ironic that artists in the new nation would rediscover Europe's magnetic cultural attraction. With the conflict behind and the immediate euphoria of independence subsiding, Americans reckoned the shallowness of their native cultural traditions. In Europe were the great old cities (including those admired ancient places), the great art masterpieces, the great conventions of patronage, the great art academies and teachers. (No regular art school operated in America until the founding of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1805.) Would-be serious artists realized the best available instruction lay abroad. Philadephian Benjamin West, in 1759 the first native-born American artist to go to Europe for study, remained and eventually became a leading member of the Royal Academy in London, even the organization's director from 1792 until his death in 1820. Yet, always cognizant of his American nationality, he generously took many young American painting students into his studio, including Matthew Pratt, Charles Willson Peale, William Dunlap, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, Samuel F. B. Morse, Washington Allston, and Thomas Sully. In time, each returned to the United States with refined technique, expanded vision, and perhaps most importantly, awareness of other worthy purposes for art beyond portraiture, especially allegorical and historical work.

* Though the Church of England was sanctioned in nine of the original thirteen colonies, it was far from preponderant. And while it might be argued that in those areas where Puritans dominated, a theocracy was thereby established, it was of no particular benefit to the arts.