Antiques.

 
Visited this afternoon the Metropolitan Museum of Art ... on West 
Fourteenth Street.... Art treasures (so-called) are evidently 
accumulating in New York, being picked up in Europe by our millionaires 
and brought home. This collection promises very well, indeed. Twenty 
years hence it will probably have grown into a really instructive 
museum. 
George Templeton Strong, Diary, June 3, 1873 

In a spirit of snobbish annoyance Henry James, the fastidious expatriate, advised his readers that true art must wither in the "cruel air" of America. He was, of course, wrong. More than a century earlier the immigrant painter John Smibert had written his London agent that the future of the arts might well be in America. He was on the right track since painting has flourished here from colonial times to the present. The realism of our portrait painting has been called a reflection of the practical people who live here. The spaciousness of our landscape painting is right not only because of its topographical correctness, but also because our painters have not needed a sophisticated style to convey the boundlessness of the land. For generations our art has been the mirror of ourselves as a people.

Conditions in colonial America did not encourage rapid development of the fine arts. There were no patrons, no public art museums or private collections of consequence, and no art schools. However, a surprising number of first-rate artists did teach themselves painting, drawing, and sculpture. The first outstanding painters born in America, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, were essentially self-taught, and both emigrated to England, where they found fame.

After the War of 1812, faith in the future of the United States burned with evangelical fervor at every level. Ralph Waldo Emerson counseled in 1837, "Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close. The millions that around us are rushing into life, cannot always ...