In retrospect I can imagine someone saying, "Okay, he sounds like a fairly important figure in the development of American literature, but that doesn't make him that significant in the culture as a whole." Wait! No. I can't. That's too ignorant. If I wrote the essay refuting that, the person who said it wouldn't be able to read or comprehend it.
Anyway, my point here is that I majored in English at a college in Maine where most of the English department faculty were American Lit specialists, and no one ever mentioned John Neal.
There's more to his influence than that:
John Neal Part Three: Art Criticism
Though Neal earned money as a miniature portraitist and watercolor instructor in his teens, he later denied any artistic ability. Those early experiences may have contributed to his appreciation of portrait painters trained in sign painting and applied arts.
He began to write art criticism in his Baltimore days and is belatedly acknowledged as America’s first art critic. During that time he visited Rembrandt Peale’s museum and wrote extensive reviews of the museum’s annual exhibits in 1822 and 1823. His values in regards to visual art have much in common with those he expressed and practiced in literature. He favored a bold approach, a free style without too much polish. He advocated for an explicitly American art, an expression of the true American landscape and character.
His period of greatest activity and influence came later, upon his return to Portland. He advocated for several Portland artists, influencing patrons to support them, and connecting them to a wider audience, an audience they proved to deserve.
He promoted Charles Codman, winning for him the patronage of James Deering. Codman was a self-taught sign painter. With Neal’s backing he became a celebrated landscape artist who headlined the first ever art exhibit at Mechanics Hall in Portland. Codman’s original marble gravestone in the Eastern Cemetery was lost to erosion and replaced with a modern granite one.
This is an aside, but that modern stone is probably the newest stone in the Eastern Cemetery for all time now. In the early days of Spirits Alive, the friends group for the Eastern Cemetery, a campaign raised money for the stone, because of Codman’s significance. After its installation the fledgling group learned more about historic stewardship. Replacement stones are not appropriate at a cemetery that is on the National Register of Historic Places. The campaign to replace Codman’s stone speaks to his cultural importance, and, by extension, Neal’s.
Neal patronized and promoted Benjamin Paul Akers, a sculptor whose The Dead Pearl Diver appears in a Nathaniel Hawthorne book, and also is one of my all-time favorite works in the Portland Museum of Art (PMA). Akers died at 35. Neal lamented that Akers’ early death kept him from more fame.
Neal also supported Franklin Simmons early in his career. Simmons’ works highlight Portland’s cityscape. When I show folks Our Lady of Victory on the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Monument Square, I note that Simmons was from Maine, but he had a studio in Rome, so he wasn’t just a local kid. His works in marble in the PMA are always worth looking at. The statue there of Ulysses S. Grant in ordinary soldier's clothes was rejected for the U. S. Capitol. He did another of Grant in a more classic style, one of several of his works on display in Washington D. C.
Another artist who began his career as a sign and banner painter, and benefited from Neal’s support was Harrison Bird Brown. Brown is celebrated as Portland’s most successful painter of the nineteenth century. He influenced the founding of the Portland Society of Art, ancestor of the PMA, and was an early president. Brown’s dramatically lit landscapes carried the influence of the Hudson River School into the twentieth century.
As with the literary history in part two, it is revealing to look at the history of art in the United States. In the pre-colonial and colonial periods we had native, primitive, and folk art. The first American art movement is the Hudson River School, beginning in 1826 and dominating American art until the late 1800’s. Hudson River School works portrayed the sublime beauty of the American landscape dramatically, emphasizing the limitless possibilities of the U. S.
So, in the early 1820’s there was no distinctly American art movement, but John Neal argued in print for a bold approach using landscape to express the American character. Within a decade we had our first art movement, based on the same ideas Neal advocated, “the unadulterated truth of the American locality and nature.” The modern scholar Francesca Orestana wrote that Neal's opinions from that earlier period “to a remarkable degree ... have stood the trying test of time.” Just as with American literature, when we go back to the earliest days of American art, we find John Neal influencing its development by his opinions and his support of particular artists.
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