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But broadly speaking, two things created a major American art. The first was the Revolution, which fixed American neoclassicism as the speech of elevated visual discourse and gave American artists heroic themes from their own history and experience. The second was the discovery of great space and, within its vastness, of unique nature. To this we owe the lucid, entranced sea visions of such painters as Lane and Heade. Theirs was the distinctive language of American luminism, with the surface of sea and sky like a membrane of pure contemplation, every pebble and mast distinct, caught in a kind of sacramental hush.
In a more dramatic, oratorical way, this discovery is also the basic subject of the huge landscape "machines" produced by late 19th century artists who went West, such as Church and Albert Bierstadt, both exceptionally well represented in this show. Each image of waterfall and mountain, volcano and precipice becomes an act of appropriation, the pictorial equivalent to the myth of Manifest Destiny. Practically no French or English painting of the day presents such pre-Cinemascope prodigies with such coercive zeal; with them, the idea of American vision almost becomes a fetish.
But the exhibition opens all manner of tantalizing questions about the supposed isolation of American art, particularly after 1850, when it was almost taken for granted that the successful home artist would have to study either in Düsseldorf or, more likely, in Paris. It is true that some very good American art of this period could not plausibly have been done elsewhere; for example, John Haberle's trompe-l'oeil painting A Bachelor's Drawer, 1890-94, with its laconically joky collection of mementos signifying the past lusts and present debts of a minor artist's life. Yet for every apparent isolate like Homer, there were a dozen Americans beavering away in the teaching studios of Paris, especially those run by Jean-Léon Gérôme, who was Thomas Eakins' teacher, and Thomas Couture, who trained Eastman Johnson.
These academics, once scorned by modernist taste but now almost as rehabilitated as their pupils, gave new American art its pedigree. At one point Gérôme had 90 American students. As an American critic remarked in 1864, "We have not time to invent and study everything anew. The fast-flying 19th century would laugh us to scorn should we attempt it. No one dreams of it in science, ethics or physics. Why then propose it in art?" It may be that even the most "American" of Eakins' paintings—his rowing scenes on the Schuylkill River, so astute in their blending of lyrical responses with the nuts and bolts of anatomy and structure—were partly inspired by Gérôme's exotic canvases of barges on the Nile.
Eakins' masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, 1875, certainly bridges two cultural worlds. On the one hand, one can read it as a very American icon of progress; it is a fervent, secular celebration of objective scientific knowledge, with the realism of paint serving that of science. Dr. Gross, light shining from his high forehead and glittering on his bloody hand and scalpel, is a pragmatic hero, and his skill is set before us as part of his American nature.