Art of a Young America.

• Position: Works by John Trumbull, Lilly Martin Spencer, Raphaelle Peale, Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Alvan Fisher, Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Robert Scott Duncanson, Samuel Colman, Frederic Edwin Church, and Hiram Powers - Brief Article

A touring exhibition of paintings and sculptures reflects the growing self-awareness and optimism of the new nation.

A TOURING EXHIBITION, "Young America: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum," presents 54 major paintings and sculptures that trace the transformation of the colonies into nationhood. These rare artworks from the 1760s through the 1870s reveal the growing self-awareness and optimism of the new nation. They reflect life in New England and the mid-Atlatic regions, where British influence was strong in early decades, then rivaled in art by Italian neoclassic styles.

"These portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and scenes of daily life show the artists' ambition to equal the best European art, but they also reveal developments within this country," notes Elizabeth Broun, the museum's director. "They help us understand how a British colony became an independent nation, how wilderness lands were both cherished and developed, and how a rural democracy responded to the Industrial Revolution."

Portraiture was the surest path to success for early artists. John Singleton Copley's "Mrs. George Watson" (1765) shows a merchant's wife in colonial Boston, with a lavish lace-trimmed dress, imported vase, and exotic parrot tulip. The artist depicts his subject as a fine British gentlewoman living in a colonial outpost.

Charles Willson Peale painted the tender double portrait of "Mrs. James Smith and Grandson" in 1776, soon after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The young boy holds a manual of rhetoric open to Hamlet's soliloquy, his finger resting on the line, "To be or not to be," which doubles as an invitation to both personal and national self-definition.

John Trumbull's "The Misses Mary and Hannah Murray" (1806) shows two sisters with musical score and drawing pencil, and Gilbert Stuart's incisive "John Adams" (1826) depicts the formidable former president shortly before his death. Such pictures go beyond mere likeness to reveal deeper characteristics--eagerness for refinement and culture on the one hand, and no-nonsense directness on the other--that were considered "distinctly American."

Although mostly self-taught, Lilly Martin Spencer supported a large family through her painting and was one of the first American women to achieve success in the arts. Her 1869 full-length picture of Mrs. Fithian in a brand-new satin dress and holding a drooping rose is called "We Both Must Fade" reflecting a Victorian sentiment...