| At the conclusion of the Civil War nationalism was a strong force in American culture. The growth of a national school of art centered in New York City took on new importance in a wave of nationalistic feeling that inspired American art patrons to pay tremendously inflated prices for the works of the popular painters of the day. This extravagant patronage ceased rather abruptly after 1875, and for the remainder of the nineteenth century the American painter struggled to sell his work to an unsympathetic public that preferred contemporary European painting.;The American painter of this time was the principal marketer of his work. His studio doubled as a showroom where he received visitors and prospective patrons. This arrangement proved most successful when a patron could conveniently visit several studios at one time, as was the case in the studio buildings where many artists rented working space under one roof. However, attracting patrons to the studios, even in the studio buildings, remained a problem and actual sales of paintings were unpredictable at best.;Artists' organizations offered an alternative to selling from the studios. The National Academy of Design, in particular, provided the American artist with important opportunities to exhibit and sell his work, but it could not provide enough exposure for all artists. Smaller groups of artists with common interests formed organizations such as the Society of American Artists, the Artists' Fund Society, the American Art Union and the Ten American Painters, which attempted to satisfy the need for additional opportunities for exhibition and sale.;Unfortunately, exhibitions sponsored by the artists' societies did not attract regular patronage. The New York gentlemen's clubs offered the possibility of such patronage. Their wealthy members were interested in art and willing to support it by sponsoring regular exhibitions of contemporary American art. For those artists whose work was frequently exhibited by the clubs, it was an ideal arrangement: a group of loyal, wealthy patrons who not only bought their paintings but also arranged for them to be shown. The problem was that only a small group of artists was thus favored by the clubs.;Among the members of the clubs there were several individuals whose collections of contemporary American painting were extraordinary: Thomas B. Clarke, William T. Evans, Alexander C. Humphreys, John Harsen Rhoades, J. R. Andrews, Emerson McMillin, Henry T. Chapman and Samuel T. Shaw. These loyal patrons performed many functions for American artists in addition to buying their works: they organized exhibitions, promoted them extensively and, in the absence of dealers, often arranged sales.;Commercial galleries were generally reluctant to show or invest in American painting during the 1870s and 1880s. There were however several attempts at giving broad representation to American artists--notably by Samuel P. Avery, The American Art Gallery and the American Art Association--but all were shortlived. The Macbeth Gallery, which opened in 1892, was the first commercial gallery in New York to develop an active and successful business dealing exclusively in American art. Macbeth's success was doubly important to American painters in that it inspired others to follow in his footsteps.;The impressive results of the auction sales of several of the better-known collections of American art gave another spur to the market for American piainting around 1900. The enormous publicity that these sales generated did more than anything else to increase prices and demand for contemporary American painting.;By 1915 the market proved that a fine American painting was considered to be as valuable as a fine European painting. Auction sales, in particular, were regularly illustrating this point. |
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