y they had formed a numerous and ponderable layer of American society. It was this self-opinionated, presumptuous and self-seeking middle class, hopelessly prosaic and culturally backward that determined the low level of current taste. American art was deeply affected by this leveling influence of democratization. Until the mid century portraiture retained its predominance, the demand for portraits even increased. Never had portrait production been so plentiful as in this period and never had portraits been so dull and characterless. With a few exception it was a deadly dull run-of-the-mill product, a stream of mediocre, largely routine, almost indistinguishable likenesses with neither character nor artistic interest. These flattering, idealized and sentimental portraits with literal and naturalistic depiction of detail conformed to the taste of the period and met the requirements of the bourgeois clientele.Sully yielded to the corrupt tastes of Jacksonian democracy. With the close of the heroic period in American history his art began to deteriorate and after the 1820s he produced few good portraits. But in comparison with Sully, Milton Brown remarks, his contemporaries were as determinedly pedestrian as their sitters were middle class. Aristocratic airs and psychological vitality had given way to the staidly sober and the conventionally pretty. the portraitists of the time, the suppliers of idealizedportraits, were Charles Elliott, Samuel Morse, John Neagle, Chester Harding, Samuel Waldo, John Jarvis, but the most popular, no doubt, was George PA Healy, who was fantastically prolific. He returned to America for less than twelve years, but during this time, he painted more than five hundred portraits. Some of the earlier works of these artists were interesting but the bulk of the later output is dry and tiresome [1, p. 17-20]. painting american history landscape peculiar feature of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American art was the richness and variety of folk painting. In America folk painting played a much more important role than in European art. Many self-taught but able itinerant artists rambled over the countryside and now and then produced masterful works. They painted portraits, landscapes, houses, ships, still lifes, tavern signs, pictures of funerals. In many respects their works are similar to the paintings of the early limners. Most folk paintings have a certain degree of flatness. The figures have hard edges and clear boundaries marking the limits of the subject in space. Another feature of folk art is that the painter s vision is direct. Folk artists avoid sophisticated poses, striking estures and props. They display artistic innocence and spontaneity, he most gifted folk artist of the nineteenth century was Edward Hicks (1780-1849), a coach and ornamental painter and a prominent Quaker preacher in Newtown, Pennsylvania. His work represents an exceptional example of folk unprofessional art. His best-known work is a naive romantic Utopia The Peaceable Kingdom. This was his favourite theme and he returned to it over and over again, producing between 1816 and 1849 nearly one hundred versions.West exerted a strong pull on the imagination of nineteenth-century Americans. The life of the Indians, the bitter conflict between Indians and settlers, daily life in the new raw communities provided subject matter of great novelty. Many artists went west to paint Indian life. The first important painter...
