Water Color Painting

In the latter part of the nineteenth century the art of water color painting began to show a marked development. A Collection of English water colors exhibited in New York in 1865 is said to have given a stimulus that resulted in the formation, within a year, of the American Water Color Society, which held its first exhibition in 1867, the society publishing at the time a pamphlet enlightening the general ignorance as to the durability of water colors. From that date interest in aquarelles increased, and found expression in the founding of the New York Water Color Club in 1890, and in the arrangement of minor exhibitions at various times.

Albert F. Bellows, Gilbert Burling, and John M. Falconer were among the early members of the society, and a large number of artists began to devote considerable attention to water-color painting, in which much technical advance was soon recorded. Pastels, a medium difficult to handle, but with which beautiful and delicate effects can be produced, was taken up by a number of artists, and the Society of Painters in Pastel was founded, and annual exhibitions were held.

Panoramas and Scene Painting

Artists in New York also showed ability in the production of panoramas and the painting of scenery for the theatre. A panorama of London, exhibited in Greenwich Street in 1795 by William Winstanley, is said to have been the first picture of the kind seen in this country. Vanderlyn, visiting Versailles, formed the project of painting a panoramic view of the place. In 1817, two years after his return to the United States, he erected a panoramic building in New York, the Rotunda, in which he showed a number of panoramas. Among exhibitions of this kind at a later date were a panorama of New York City, painted by Holland and his pupils Reinagle and Evers, and shown in 1813, and john Banvard's panorama of the Mississippi, three miles in length: Robert Burford's Jerusalem; Loomis' panorama of Cuba; Sattler's Cosmorama, and Catherwood's Jerusale.

Later the panoramas and cycloramas shown in New York bore the signature of foreign artists. Later still the development of the motion picture displaced them. Later scene painters displayed much talent, Thomas A. Cooper, who managed the New York Theatre, gave employment to various artists. Matt Morgan, the caricaturist, Illustrator, painter, designer of theatrical lithographic posters, and maker of art pottery, was well known as an excellent scene painter. The American Society of Scenic Painters was founded in 1892. The later French influence showed itself in the art colonies in New York, and the growing discontent with old methods found expression in the Art Students' League and the Society of American Artists.

Portraiture

In the fine arts the representation, by means of painting, sculpture, or engraving, of the appearance of an individual or a group of persons. As regards size portraits may be busts, half figure, three-quarter or full length; as regards the position of the countenance, they are full face, half profile, profile or profil perdu, if the face is further reversed. Portraiture is of very ancient origin. Sepulchral statues of the earliest Egyptian empire show that the art was even then highly developed. During the best period of Greek art, ideal portraits of individuals, of a certain likeness, but rather intended to represent character types were frequently executed, both in statues and in busts, as may be seen from the most celebrated surviving examples, the Lateran "Sophocles" and the bust of Pericles in the British Museum.

 Since the sixteenth century portraiture has found its chief expression in painting. Even during the decline of the Italian and other schools, portraiture remained comparatively good, because in it the artist is compelled to adhere to nature. With the great development of painting in the seventeenth century portraiture assumed a new importance, especially in the schools which attained the highest development, namely those of the Netherlands and of Spain. In Holland Rembrandt, by the skillful manipulation of light and shade and by skillful coloring, achieved highly realistic and characteristic results.

Although the eighteenth century was an age of decline in painting, portraiture found in France a characteristic, realistic expression in the works of the sculptors, like Houdon, and in the work of the great portrait engravers like Nanteuil and Edelinck. In England an art of a realistic character flourished in the portraits of Reynolds, Gainsborough, Lawrence, and in those of Raeburn in Scotland.During the nineteenth century the demand for portraits by no means decreased, and nearly all of the great figure painters have also been portraitists. In France Classicists, Realists, and Impressionists, have all contributed their quota to the evolution of the portrait, and to mention the names of those who have done good portraiture would be to enumerate the great figure painters of France.

The earliest American portraitists of the colonial and revolutionary periods like Copley, Trumbull, and Sully, resemble contempory English painters in their eclectic manner, except Gilbert Stuart, who occasionally did work of a high order. In recent years America has produced a number of portraitists of exceptional ability, trained, for the most part, in France.