The United States of America is a young nation. Before 1776, we didn't even have an identity as a nation- before 1776, we were Englishmen.
Mostly English farmers and fishermen.
Granted, I should have known there was something more there among the farmers and fishermen. After all, the Founding Fathers did not come out of nothing.
By the mid 18th Century the United States of America had seaports with ships from France, Amsterdam and far across the world of the Atlantic Ocean.
Before the Revolution, America had produced its first celebrity who was famous back in Europe- Benjamin Franklin, one of the most famous scientists of the European world in his day.
I think of American culture as taking off in the 1920's, in the age of Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens, the rise of Hollywood, and the rise of Duke Ellington, with this preceded by an unusual precocity in literature, where America already had a great legendary literature scene in the 19th Century.
I was aware that the United States in the mid 19th Century had at least one fine school of painters.
Now I know that in the time of the Revolution itself America already had a painter as fine in the European tradition as many of the great Native American artists whose anonymous art still thrived, mostly undiminished since the native America revival of the late 17th Century, at the very same time.
Meet John Trumbull.
He's the one who painted all those famous paintings of the American revolution.
Now I know that these paintings were not made in mid 19th Century America some 70 years later, or in Napoleon's Paris where they identified with the cause.
These were not like the historical paintings you see of famous events painted 100 years later.
These classics were painted by someone who was there, who lived through the Revolution and its war, and who painted the battles of the American Revolution and the ceremonies of the founding of a young nation in the very age of the Revolution itself.
And these are magnificent.
Classics of the grand European tradition of post-Renaissance painting- one of three things that post-Renaissance Europe did better than they did anything else, with science and classical music.
Europe from the Italian Renaissance until WWI did three things above all: science, music, and painting. (and with painting, art engraving.)
This is where post-Renaissance Europe matches things like native American agriculture and monument building^, Chinese porcelain, Sanskrit literature and Islamic art.
And in the time of the Revolution, the new United States of America- just a few months before still Englishmen- already had a great master of European painting.
Wow.
That is impressive for such a young nation!
Granted, John Trumbull was still a student at the time of the Revolutionary War, like Beethoven studying under Haydn or van Gogh just before he left Holland for Antwerp and Paris- but not that long after the end of the war, he was completing his first masterpieces!
Look up John Trumbull's paintings and judge for yourself!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson
^Like the Mayan pyramids (there were grand earthen monuments in the lands of the Mississippi and the Ohio as well!)