John Neal, the Rise of the Critick, and the Rise of American Art

John Neal (1793-1876) was one of the earlist critics of American art. He worked both in London and in the US, during the first decades of the XIX c. The essay explores the American art scene, and the intersections between aesthetic thought, the commodification of art and national consciousness; it argues that Neal's critical writings about American art sought to find a compromise between national identity and established, inherited, artistic conventions. In Neal's approach to art criticism one may appreciate the distance from the dominant English model of sir Joshua Reynolds. Neal was an early advocate of the unique value of American Landscape as the fittest subject for the American artist. The Essay places Neal at the origins of American art criticism, as well as at the source of those acts of reading which would culminate in the so-called American renaissance.