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In one sense, Bread and Cheese was only the latest in a long line of fraternities organized in the city by dabbling amateurs and self-taught connoisseurs among the elite—most recently, the Knickerbocker wits who had held court at the Shakespeare Tavern and preserved their repartee in print, as much for their own amusement as for the public’s. Yet it also contained the germ of something quite new. Among its members were artists and writers who regarded their crafts as full-time vocations, not hobbies to be pursued in moments snatched from law or commerce, and the club helped them forge a new kind of professional identity. Morse, Cole, Bryant, Durand, John Wesley Jarvis, and Dunlap cemented friendships there, as did Fitz-Greene Halleck, versifier and man about town; Gulian Verplanck, writer on law and theology, editor of Shakespeare, and spokesman of the New York Dutch; and James Kirke Paulding, still grinding out material for Salmagundi, his old venture with Washington Irving (who, now abroad, was a Bread and Cheese man in absentia).

Although the club failed to survive Cooper’s departure for a long European sojourn in 1826, the growing sense of solidarity it bred among professional artists had already laid the foundation for a confrontation with Trumbull’s Academy of Fine Arts. When some young painters sought access to the academy’s collections to practice their drawing, Trumbull, full of patrician hauteur, barred the way and advised them to “remember that beggars are not to be choosers.” Late in 1825 the painters struck back by founding their own organization, the New York Drawing Association, with Morse as president and Cole and Ithiel Town among the founding members. The following year it became the National Academy of Design, which unlike the Fine Arts Academy was to be run strictly by and for artists—“on the commonsense principle,” Morse wrote, “that every profession in a society knows what measures are necessary for its own improvement.” Artists all over the country came to think of the National Academy’s annual exhibition as the most desirable place to show their latest work. In a similar spirit, Morse, Bryant, Cole, Durand, and Verplanck, with other professional writers and artists, came together in 1829 to form the Sketch Club.

All this was a frontal assault on the notion—an article of faith for men like Pintard and Clinton—that the propertied classes were competent to steer artistic and literary production for the greater municipal good, and it marked the beginning of a decline in genteel cultural authority. Artists had effectively shifted relations with the Hones and Hosacks, Gracies and Griswolds to a less paternalistic, more market-mediated footing, which in turn summoned professional “critics” into being. Before 1825 literary magazines hadn’t covered the negligible fine arts world; now the weekly New-York Mirror began reviewing the annual exhibitions at the National Academy and reproducing some of the artwork via engravings and woodcuts.

The older model of patrician patronage, having helped foster a cultural community, now began to fade away. As early as 1828 the athenaeum abandoned its lecture program because too many well-to-do families were moving too far uptown (the reading room was eventually absorbed by the Society Library). The New-York Institution collapsed when the Common Council, on the recommendation of councilman James Roosevelt in 1830, refused to renew its lease on the almshouse and took the building over for municipal offices (after renovations by Alexander Jackson Davis). The Literary and Philosophical Society dissolved shortly thereafter, followed by the Academy of Fine Arts itself.

NATURE AND NOSTALGIA

For all their differences, patricians and artists had in common a lack of interest in New York City as a literary and artistic subject. Instead, they echoed the pastoral romanticism currently in vogue among European intellectuals (neither Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, nor Keats located most of a major poem in contemporary London). Addressing the Academy of