Antiques.

 
I confess that in America I saw more than America; I sought there the 
image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its character, its 
prejudices, and its passions, in order to learn what we have to fear or 
to hope from its progress. 
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835-1840 

The turbulent world of early nineteenth-century American democracy led to a broadening of the definition of culture in which useful mechanical inventions and widespread evidence of popular literacy were discussed in the same breath with the fine arts and literature. "Though there is scarce such a thing as a capital picture in the whole country," James Fenimore Cooper observed in 1828, "I have seen more beautiful, graceful and convenient ploughs in positive use here, than are probably to be found in the whole of Europe united."

The Jacksonian Age was a romantic era that affirmed the rights of all men, and the self-conscious and self-confident new nation teemed with optimism and pride. The generation of painters born after the American Revolution was not bound by the rigid artistic theories of European academies: some painted meticulous yet lyrical portraits of the beauty and grandeur of the American landscape; others rendered with clarity the workaday lives, humorous foibles, and rude, democratic manners of the uncouth Americans at work, at rest, and at play. In its arts, the country at mid-century had proved that the finer fruits of civilization could be democratized without being vulgarized.

Folk artists, too, proliferated, some painting with photographic precision and some even attaining a metaphysical level of allusion. Theirs was an art that was democratic and practical, moral and optimistic. In many ways it defies definition in ...