THE COLONIAL VS. THE NATIONAL
faced the American artist. It is a dilemma we are accustomed to bring–
ing to a focus in the novels of James, but the lines were not always as
clearly marked as he draws them there. For Copley, the problem of the
American artist had not yet been formulated in its most blighting terms,
and this helped to make possible his distinguished achievement in paint–
ing. His answer to the problem involved no more than an original modi–
fication of the European stem by an essentially American, but delicately
flexible and receptive sensibility. The tradition to which his work con–
formed necessarily remained European, but there was as yet no emo–
tional urgency to superimpose a self-conscious national pattern on top
of it, nor yet any nervous rebellion against doing so. Copley's paintings
exhibit a free and natural air, and they are almost the last American
paintings that do-at least until comparatively recent times. But Copley
was born in 1738, and the kind of problem that confronted the Colonial
was less invidious than the problem posed by the inhibiting nationalism
that grew up after the American Revolution. Their paintings reveal
a superficial similarity between Copley's and Allston's problems, but the
similarity exists only in the poverty of cultural background which drove
them both, perhaps too vehemently, to the study of ancient masterpieces
when they finally became accessible to them. The psychological barrier
between Europe and America, insofar as it exists for Copley at all, is an
obstruction easily got over.
Copley went to England shortly before the Revolution broke out,
and stayed there; and although his English pictures represent a change
from the direct, rather cold vision of his American work, they usually (but
not always) exhibit a quality that distinguishes them from the work of
his European contemporaries. But this "difference" is not due to a New
England local coloring of feeling, or a national narrowness of percep–
tion-which would certainly have been the case had Copley been born
fifty
years later; it is a "difference" which itself embodies a large part
of Copley's rare distinction, and it may be glimpsed, for example, in
his
Portrait of Midshipman Augustus Brine,
which hangs in the Metro–
politan Museum. In this portrait, despite its great indebtedness to the
English School, Copley reveals through the pinched, supercilious face of
the little midshipman a quick apprehension of personality, a shrewd light–
nin~
grasp of the elusive, individual identity rather than of the impres–
sive aristocratic type resemblances that predominate in Reynolds and
Lawrence. The portrait is a strange anticipation of Eakins, and it is,
one feels, something that only an American could have done. It repre–
sents the kind of crafty insight, the shrewd, calculating intuition, the
tense
of the hidden weakness which, vested not in an artist's eye, but in
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