Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [301]
The Historical Society swiftly attracted prestigious supporters, including Dr. Samuel Latham Mitchill, Dr. David Hosack (physician, botanist, and founder in 1801 of the Elgin Botanical Gardens), members of old New York families (like Peter Gerard Stuyvesant, the director’s great-great-grandson), judicial luminaries (like state attorney general Egbert Benson, the society’s first president), and political leaders (like Governor Daniel D. Tompkins and Mayor De Witt Clinton, who provided the group with rent-free quarters in Federal Hall on Wall Street). Though its finances were precarious, the Historical Society quickly published an Address to the Public (1805) calling for donations of materials and for answers to queries concerning points of local and national history. In 1809—the year the society was incorporated and in which it purchased Pintard’s own library—members gathered to commemorate the bicentennial of Henry Hudson’s voyage by listening to the Rev. Dr. Samuel Miller’s Discourse on the Discovery of New York, followed by a banquet at the City Hotel. Two years later, the Historical Society issued the first volume of its Collections, which featured documents on city life under the Dutch and the never-before-printed Duke’s Laws of 1665.
As it happened, Pintard’s labors on behalf of the Historical Society coincided with a mounting interest among wealthy New Yorkers in painting and the fine arts. Some of the country’s foremosts artists—Ralph Earl, James Sharpies, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, John Wesley Jarvis—all set up shop in the city at one time or another in the eighties and nineties. Prosperous burghers, as the poet William Cullen Bryant later recalled, “began to affect a taste for pictures, and the rooms of Michael Pfaff, the famous German picture dealer in Broadway, were a favorite lounge for such connoisseurs as we then had, who amused themselves with making him talk of Michael Angelo.” What was more, reformers and civic improvers like Pintard began to sense that art—the right kind of art, under the right kind of circumstances—could also help lift the sights of New Yorkers and teach them virtues vital to a republican society.
In 1802 Chancellor Robert R. Livingston and his brother Edward, the newly appointed mayor, raised several thousand dollars to establish the New York Academy of the Fine Arts (later the American Academy of Fine Arts), with none other than John Pintard as its first secretary. The academy was not an association of artists but of wealthy patrons. Its purpose, Mayor Livingston explained, was to expose New Yorkers to the best European sculpture and painting, thereby affirming “the intimate connection of Freedom with the Arts—of Science with Civil Liberty.” It would also be “useful and ornamental to our city.” That proved overly optimistic. The academy’s first exhibition, which opened in the summer of 1803 at the Greenwich Street Pantheon (formerly Rickett’s Equestrian Circus), was a disappointment. Consisting mostly of plaster casts of “the great remains of Antiquity” owned by the Louvre, it failed to attract popular interest and was cut short by that year’s epidemic of yellow fever. John Vanderlyn, a young artist introduced to New York art patrons by Aaron Burr, was dispatched to Europe to make more casts and paint copies of Raphael, Caravaggio, Titian, Rubens, and other Old Masters. The academy’s shareholders, businessmen ill-prepared to promote art appreciation among the general public, began to bicker among themselves, however, and the academy soon languished.
Its prospects brightened again in 1804, when John Trumbull returned to New York to take over as director. Trumbull was immediately swamped with commissions,