ca. 1860
As Mark Twain might have said, “American humor is a funny thing.” There is a rich tradition of laughter in American literature, drama, vaudeville, musical theater, television, magazine illustration, cartooning, even politics. Yet, both historically speaking, and for most people today, American painting seems instead to have been, and to have forever remained, a morally elevated, even sublime business, with little interest in the lighter side of life.
Admittedly, there was a time in the 19th century, and especially in the decades immediately preceding the Civil War, when some of America’s most important genre painters – notably among them William Sidney Mount, Francis Edmonds and Lilly Martin Spencer – gently explored our domestic or rural foibles. Rather than burlesquing human nature, however, they tended to play upon the politer sentiments of a country that was still reeling under the pressures of rapid transformation from frontier to town, from farm to factory, and from a more puritanical to a more leisurely life style. For the most part their gentle digs at human miscalculation, vanity, and inflated expectations have the evasive elegance of an 18th-century comedy of manners. And, at least according to art historical legend, that’s about as far as humor ever went or was expected to go in American painting. Once the Civil War ended, serious artists were expected to take themselves, well, seriously, and to be examples of both moral and aesthetic probity. They were certainly NOT encouraged to sully the fine arts with any reference to the low humor of common street life.
As we all recognize, however, official accounts sometimes don’t get around to telling the whole story. There is in fact a long tradition of energetic humor in American art, which may be suppressed in our textbooks but which matches the wit of such writers as “Artemus Ward” (Charles Farrer Browne, 1834-1867): “Let us all be happy, and live within our means, even if we have to borrow the money to do it with.”; “Mark Twain” (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910): “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter; they are an entire banquet.”; Ambrose Bierce (1842-ca. 1914): “ACQUAINTANCE, n. A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to (1881)”; and Will Rogers (1879-1935): “The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has (1924).”
From David Claypool Johnston and Thomas Nast to Red Grooms and David Levine, from John Quidor to George Luks, Reginald Marsh and Claes Oldenburg, a rich, uninterrupted, and seemingly irrepressible line of American pictorial and even sculptural wit stretches from the 1830s to the present. But perhaps the master of all 19th-century American humorist-painters was David Gilmour Blythe, who would have been better known, both in his lifetime and today, if he had ever ventured outside of his native Pittsburgh to seek fame and fortune in any of the then more predominant spheres of artistic influence, like New York, Boston and Philadelphia.
But Blythe never influenced any other artist, nor did he join any national artistic academy or association, or receive the critical praise of any of the country’s “tastemakers.” In many respects, he was sui generis, a force unto himself, striving by long trial and error to capture what he saw as the essential nature of a city – Pittsburgh – that in the 1850s and early 1860s was still in many ways a frontier town, although rapidly industrializing because of its proximity to major rivers and its newly-discovered resources of coal and oil. At the same time Pittsburgh, situated only a few miles from Virginia and fewer still from Ohio, was a hotbed of political and social turmoil, with immigrants flowing westward from Ireland and Germany, whose presence was simultaneously scourged by anti-Catholic nativists and political “Know-Nothings.” Whigs and Republicans, Southern and Northern factions alike were vying constantly for political power, while nepotism and other petty corruptions haunted both law courts and civil services.
It was the perfect seedbed for an artist like Blythe who looked at the world unconventionally, and who could quickly and devastatingly capture the flaws and hypocrisies of his fellow citizens. Yet despite Blythe’s often sardonic wit, he was still embraced as a civic treasure whose paintings were snapped up, even before they had dried, by both middle class bankers and lawyers and by such epoch-shaping personalities as Andrew Carnegie.
Blythe’s paintings, however, are unique not only in being the finest examples of American pictorial social and political satire of the mid-19th century, but also in their sources. Blythe certainly knew and borrowed from the works of the great 18th- and early-19th-century British caricaturists, like William Hogarth, Thomas Rowlandson and George Cruikshank, and he may even have had access to the early satirical lithographs of the Frenchman, Honoré Daumier, but the primary influences on his paintings were the “little masters” of 17th-century Dutch painting, like David Teniers the Younger and, more especially, Adriaen Brouwer, some of whose works he had seen early in his career in both Boston and Pittsburgh.
Blythe embraces the Dutchmen’s lively palette of greens, reds, blues and treacly browns, their contrasts of thinly painted passages and impasto highlights, and their subtle play of light and shade, but it is their vivid drawing of feature and gesture – even to the point of exaggeration – that holds a particular appeal for him, and that, in his mature work, like Room for Improvement, he masters like no other American artist before or since.
If there is any one reason that Blythe’s paintings fell out of favor toward the end of the 19th century, it is perhaps that they were too much like those of his models, Brouwer and Teniers, whose rowdy appreciation of human folly and whose images of admittedly vulgar tavern life increasingly proved to be an embarrassment to Victorian morality. Yet there is in Brouwer, Teniers and Blythe alike an honest assessment of the realities of mortal behavior and personality, and even a basic dignity in their perception of humanity. The man depicted in Room for Improvement, for example, with his reddened nose, days-old stubble, bleary gaze, bandaged eyelid and haphazardly-tilted hat and pipe, could easily be taken for an ineffectually combative town drunk, yet at the same time his attitude is that of someone who would not appreciate being taken too lightly. However besotted he may be, he is still very much alive, a force with which to be reckoned and even sympathized, rather than a conventional stereotype.
Like his contemporary George Caleb Bingham, Blythe was able to capture the raw flavor of a people and a country in the midst of change – the nation’s raftsmen, rowdies and castaways as well as their cutaway-coated brethren and beribboned sisters – in ways that ever since have continued to bring their lives to fresh reality. It is no coincidence that today Blythe’s paintings are part of some of America’s finest museum collections, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
NOTE:
Indeed, "Joe Cowell" - the origin of whose title is uncertain - has to
have been painted some 5-10 years earlier than the painting you now
have on consignment, because of the relative crudeness of its technique
when compared to your painting's fluency and sophistication.
In the late 1850s and early 1860s it was not at all unusual for Blythe
to return to subjects he had painted earlier (I can cite other
examples), especially if he thought that they presented successful
summaries of his basic pictorial ideas, such as the street urchins and
rowdies of his native Pittsburgh. "Room for Improvement" (aka "Percy")
is just such an "improvement" from the earlier model. The two versions
- "Joe Cowell" and "Room for Improvement" - have the same basic idea in
common, but "Room for Improvement" is vastly superior as a painting, by
virtue of not only of its modeling, but also of its color and
pictorial technique.
My reference for the earlier image of "Joe Cowell" is Bruce W.
Chambers, The World of David Gilmour Blythe (1815-1865), Washington,
DC: National Collection of Fine Arts/Smithsonian Institution Press,
1980, pp. 34 and 155.
Given its stylistic and physiognomic qualities, and its unique British
provenance, there is absolutely no possibility that "Room for
Improvement" could be the same painting as the previously recorded "Joe
Cowell." They are two separate paintings, with "Joe Cowell" being the
earlier (and thus less stylistically mature) painting by some 5-10
years.
With best regards, Bruce W. Chambers, author of the David Gilmour
Blythe catalogue raisonné
