The American career of Charles Robert Leslie.(Biography)

In 1826 the inaugural exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York City was hailed as a welcome and long overdue step in the country's cultural progress. One writer was especially encouraged because the initiation of the academy's annuals offered the hope of bringing the nation's cultural habits closer to those of England, where a few ambitious Americans had already achieved success: "In England, the talent yearly called forth and embodied in pictures fresh and glowing from the easel, to adorn the apartments of the great and opulent, is immense; two of our most talented countrymen (West and Leslie) swell the number." (1) Pairing Charles Robert Leslie's name with that of the illustrious American-born president of London's Royal Academy of Arts Benjamin West (1738-1820) might seem anomalous, yet in 1826 the names of both men were synonymous with the height of professional accomplishment and acted as beacons for struggling American artists at home. However, Leslie's reputation is in eclipse, and he is probably now best known as the first biographer of his friend the great English landscape painter John Constable (1776-1837). (2) The rare contemporary assessments of his art almost invariably position him as a British painter who helped launch the vogue for English history and literary subjects that began to flourish in Britain in the 1820s. (3) Indeed, from the time of his first notable critical successes as an exhibitor at the Royal Academy's annual exhibitions with such works as May Day in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Fig. 7), the British have considered Leslie one of their own despite his American parentage and upbringing. (4) For the most part his classification as a British artist is entirely understandable. He was born in London, received most of his art training there, and lived in that city for virtually all of his adult life. (5)

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Why, then, was Leslie so prominent in the early formation of an American art history? The painter and historian William Dunlap (1766-1839) offered an argument for assigning him an American identity in his landmark History of the Rise and Progress of The Arts of Design in the United States (1834). Dunlap opened his chapter on Leslie by declaring that the painter occupied "the foremost rank of living artists," an assertion that was free from limitations imposed by national origins or training. But, he concluded, "His first lessons in painting were received in America and Americans enabled the youth to seek in Europe for further instruction. He found it, but still he found Americans, though in Europe, his most efficient advisers and instructors." (6) This geographic tug-of-war to determine the artist's pedigree is not only indicative of facts specific to Leslie's biography but also points to the larger issue of internationalism. The often surprising frequency of transatlantic crossings of people, letters, and goods in the early nineteenth century created an exchange of ideas and social networks that transcended territorial boundaries and allowed for the situation in which Leslie found himself in England in 1811, where he initially lived as a foreigner in the land of his birth, surrounding himself with Americans while becoming assimilated into British culture. Yet he maintained his American connections thought his life, so much so that his art and the idea of him as an internationally successful American artist exerted substantial influence in the developing cultural community in the United States. Ironically, Leslie's career was essentially bifurcated by the time of his death and, like today, the American aspects of his work were overshadowed by his reputation as a British artist. He is presented here with the aim of fusing the transatlantic divide that characterized his career. (7)