e picture for the Louvre, but Vanderlyn demurred. His best known work Ariadne Asleep on the Island of Naxos, painted in Paris in 1812, is the most successful ideal nude produced by an American artist. This lucid, controlled and brilliantly painted nude reveals Vanderlyn s remarkable talent. In 1815 Vanderlyn returned to America and exhibited Ariadne and some other paintings that had won him fame in Paris. But in America Vanderlyn s neoclassical works brought him neither success nor fame. Puritanic America was shocked, the prudish New Yorkers saw in the unabashed nudity of the classic heroine a shocking witness to the depraving influence of European taste [9, p. 130-134].
1.3 The Era of Jacksonian Democracy
close of the heroic period in American history brought about a decline in American art. This decline was connected with the advent of the Jacksonian era with its rapid development of capitalist relations, westward expansion and democratization of taste. The middle class grew in numbers and affluence. After the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 all sorts of profiteers, businessmen and adventurers who were making huge fortunes began to play a leading and predominant role in the social and political fife of the country. By the middle of the century 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]. 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 count...
