xamples is not imitative; it is characterized by bright national peculiarities. It is American in subject matter, in emotional and intellectual content, and in style. It is much younger than the art of the Old World. It was roughly a hundred years after the death of Raphael that the first permanent English settlements appeared in America. The earliest American painting that has come down to us dates from about the middle of the seventeenth century when Velasquez in Spain and Rembrandt in the Netherlands were creating their masterpieces.the course of three centuries, American painting has passed through a long and complex period of development from earnest attempts by early limners through a budding florescence in the late eighteenth century to its highly contradictory state in modern times, which are torn by a fierce struggle between progressive realist traditions and the reactionary formalistic experimentation of modernism. It is a strong realist tradition which constitutes a distinct feature of American painting. It is this realist tradition that has given the world a long list of brilliant, gifted artists who have reflected in their art the spirit of the advanced social movements and progressive ideas of the American people.art had to develop under adverse conditions: engaged in subduing the wilderness and struggling for survival in the new, unexplored land, the colonists had little time and interest in any but utilitarian art.of the colonial artists, including some of the best, were self-taught. Many of them were artisans - carpenters, shipwrights, house painters, sign and carriage painters. Some went on to more sophistication, but most remained essentially primitive. Early America had a much larger proportion of folk artists than Europe.folk artist had certain qualities that the more sophisticated artist had lost. He went straight to the heart of things. Instinctively, without theorizing, he knew that art is not the photographic copying of nature, but the creation of a pictorial equivalent of nature in physical materials - canvas, pigment, stone or wood. He retained the craftsman s respect for the physical substance and structure of the work of art. His eye was an innocent one, concerned more with the object itself than its appearance. He had an innate gift for simplification, for recording the essentials. And he had an instinctive feeling for form and line and colour, and the patterns they created. Hence his art, within definite limits, represented something sound and pure.folk art was created directly out of reality, out of local and specific content, which gave it a strong native flavour. Sometimes it contained reminiscences of whatever art its producer might have seen - prints, textiles, porcelain or the instruction books that took the place of art schools. But all this was translated into folk language.native flavour appeared early in the untrained limners who painted portraits in the colonies from the middle seventeenth century on. Many of them were travelling artists - who went from town to town, sometimes with stock portraits already painted except for the sitter s individual face, hands and accessories. They seldom bothered to sign their works. So most of them have remained anonymous.style the limners varied from colony to colony and from artist to artist, ranging from the severity of certain New England painters to the naive elegance of the New York and Hudson River artists. But they had in common...
