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 the primitive virtues of honesty, an instinct for colour, line and decorative pattern, and above all. the physical integrity that marks the primitive in every age and land.the eighteenth century the colonies had become prosperous enough to attract professional painters from England and European countries, Justus Engelhardt Kuhn, a German artist, settled in 1708 at Annapolis; GustavusHesselius, a Swede, in 1711 in Philadelphia; Jeremiah Theus, a Swiss, in 1739 in Charleston; John Smibert in 1730 in Boston. John Wollasion arrived in New, York in 1749 and Joseph Blackburn in Boston in 1753. Both of them painted in the colonies for about twenty years. These artists of European origin and training represented professional standards and had some influence on American art as it emerged. But, by the middle of the eighteenth century it was already not the immigrant artists but the-native ones who left a significant heritage.two most gifted native-born artists who grew out of the general colonial tradition were R. Feke and J. S , Copley [1, p. 10-14].
1.2 The First American Revolution and the young republic
American Revolution of 1775-83 laid the basis for the rapid development of industry, culture and art in the young republic. The general patriotic and heroic enthusiasm of the period gave rise to an upsurge in the spiritual and creative sphere of activities. A new, important stage in the history of American art began. National consolidation, growth of national consciousness and wide dissemination of democratic ideas were powerful factors in the formation of American art. Without severing its ties with European culture it was acquiring an increasingly national character. If the self-taught artist was typical in colonial American painting, now professional artists trained in the established academies of England or France took over the leadership. A distinct American school in portraiture and depiction of historical events was evident by 1800. It was characterized by the choice...
