In colonial North America, history painting lacked an institutional or economic basis. Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley went to England to pursue their careers as history painters. After the Revolutionary War John Trumbull dedicated himself almost exclusively to the painting of wartime events. Declaration of Independence (1787�1819) and three other Revolutionary War scenes by Trumbull installed in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol provided the young nation with a historical record of its own birth.
Subsequent generations of history painters broadened the spectrum of historical subjects beyond the patriotic topicality of recent war. Washington Allston, John Vanderlyn, and Samuel F. B. Morse replaced Trumbull's dynamic battle scenes with more contemplative themes from the Bible, mythology, and antiquity. Among their goals were efforts to raise the level of artistic refinement and tolerance among the American public. Vanderlyn tried to accomplish this through works such as the provocative Ariadne Abandoned on the Isle of Naxos (1809�1814), which introduced American audiences to the female nude and located the new figural style in a mythological narrative. In Old House of Representatives (1822�1823) Morse attempted to instill in Americans pride in the everyday workings of representative democracy. Allston's career illustrates how the educational goals of his generation conflicted with their romantic, sometimes even spiritual aspirations. Allston, who refused to paint popular battle scenes, poured his creative energy into an epic Old Testament scene, Belshazzar's Feast (1817�1843). The work, however, remained unfinished and largely incomprehensible to its intended audience.
The four painters who followed Trumbull in filling the rotunda walls in the Capitol, Vanderlyn, John Gadsby Chapman, Robert Weir, and William H. Powell, focused on themes of conquest and discovery. History painting was now harnessed into the politics of westward expansion. Images of Native Americans genuflecting in front of noble Spanish discoverers set the historical stage for the policies of Indian removal in Jacksonian America. Later artists often maintained a critical distance from political events. Painted during the Mexican-American War, Emanuel Leutze's Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops (1848) represents Spaniards and Aztecs in fierce and deadly battle. Spanish victory is inevitable but comes at the price of horrible human suffering. Some painters attempted to incorporate historical theories into their works. Thomas Cole's Course of Empire (1833�1836) followed the idea of cyclical history to comment on the destructive energies brought forth by Jacksonian democracy. Leutze's large mural painting for the Capitol, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (1862), on the other hand, gave credence to the millennial belief that world history could culminate in the United States and cyclical patterns in history could come to an end.
In colonial-era and antebellum sculpture, historical subjects covered a similar spectrum of revolutionary, quasi-mythological, and captivity themes. Commissioned by the Virginia legislature, the French sculptor J. A. Houdon designed a marble statue of George Washington (1788) that came to embody the ideal statesman. Horatio Greenough's George Washington (1832�1841) rendered the father of the country as a bare-chested Olympian god�more heroic, but far less acceptable to American taste. Classicizing ideals, however, dominated antebellum sculptures by Hiram Powers, Harriet Hosmer, and Edmonia Lewis. Hosmer's Zenobia in Chains (1859) and Lewis's Cleopatra (1876) portray powerful historical women in enslaved or tragic circumstances. Powers's female nude, The Greek Slave (1843), is more vulnerable and passive.
After the Civil War the representation of historical themes in art became more diffuse and history painting itself was transformed. Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran applied the epic grandeur of history painting to the Western landscape. Winslow Homer's oil paintings of the Civil War, including his Prisoners from the Front (1866), translated the historical conflict and its effect on emancipated slaves into genre painting. Figure painters and sculptors treated the Reconstruction period in scenes of domestic life. In Eastman Johnson's Boyhood of Lincoln (1868), the national hero and martyr sits by the fireside reading a book. The colonial revival with its desire to reconstruct colonial life gave further impetus to the domestication of history. By the turn of the century, however, Frederic Remington and Charles Schreyvogel were painting a final historical struggle on the western frontier, which turned Anglo-Saxons into a besieged race. Some painters of contemporary life employed older historical modes. Thomas Eakins's Gross Clinic (1875), for instance, functions within the tradition of historical portraiture. Heroic portraiture in sculpture culminated in Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Shaw Memorial (1884�1897). Yet the equestrian portrait of Robert Gould Shaw towers over the row of African American Union soldiers who were here commemorated for the first time.
With the renaissance of mural painting in the late nineteenth century, historical art appeared on the walls of major private and public libraries. During the first half of the twentieth century, historical painting flourished in mural projects, but it was also transformed by modernist experiment. Muralists such as Diego Rivera, Ben Shahn, and Thomas Hart Benton borrowed from contemporary theater and film productions and deliberately broke up the historical narrative. In his now destroyed multinarrative mural for Rockefeller Center in New York City (1933), Rivera embraced a Marxist notion of historical class struggle and international solidarity. Shahn painted the history of Jewish immigration in his Jersey Homesteads mural (1937�1938). The politically conservative Benton turned to the American scene for historical inspiration. Later in the twentieth century historical art became the object of postmodern irony and parody, as in Larry Rivers's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953) harking back to Leutze's epic painting of a century before, but it also remained a vital instrument for recovering the histories of "forgotten"minorities.
United States Senate: Paintings
Architect of the Capitol: Capitol Campus√
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Historical Subjects in Painting and Sculpture" (by Jochen Wierich), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=192 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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