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THE DECLINE OF PORTRAITURE
The close of the heroic period in American history brought about a decline in American art. This decline was connected with the advent of the Jacksonian era with its rapid development of capitalist relations, westward expansion and democratization of taste. The middle class grew in numbers and affluence. After the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 all sorts of profiteers, businessmen and adventurers who were making huge fortunes began to play a leading and predominant role in the social and political fife of the country. By the middle of the century they had formed a numerous and ponderable layer of American society. It was this self-opinionated, presumptuous and self-seeking middle class, hopelessly prosaic and culturally backward that determined the low level of current taste. American art was deeply affected by this levelling influence of “democratization”. Until the mid century portraiture retained its predominance, the demand for portraits even increased. Never had portrait production been so plentiful as in this period and never had portraits been so dull and characterless. With a few exception it was a deadly dull run-of-the-mill product, a stream of mediocre, largely routine, almost indistinguishable likenesses with neither character nor artistic interest. These flattering, idealized and sentimental portraits with literal and naturalistic depiction of detail conformed to the taste of the period “and met the requirements of the bourgeois clientele.
Even Sully yielded to the corrupt tastes of “Jacksonian democracy”. With the close of the heroic period in American history his art began to deteriorate and after the 1820s he produced few

pood portraits. But “in comparison with Sully,” Milton Brown remarks, “his contemporaries were as determinedly pedestrian as their sitters were middle class. Aristocratic airs and psychological vitality had given way to the staidly sober and the conventionally pretty.”
Among the portraitists of the time, the suppliers of idealized” portraits, were Charles Elliott, Samuel Morse, John Neagle, Chester Harding, Samuel Waldo, John Jarvis, but the most popular, no doubt, was George P. A. Healy, who was fantastically prolific. He returned to America for less than twelve years, but during this time, he painted more than five hundred portraits. Some of the earlier works of .these artists were interesting but the bulk of the later output is dry and tiresome.

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