Reviewed by Wendy Bellion | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4

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Reviewed by Wendy Bellion | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware

The Worlds of Jacob Eichholtz: Portrait Painter of the Early Republic. Edited by Thomas R. Ryan. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. 176 pages. $39.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper).
Museums have done much during the past twenty years to help propel studies in early American art history. Exhibitions on the work of John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, and the many artists of the Peale family have yielded catalogs of significant scholarly merit. To this list scholars may now add The Worlds of Jacob Eichholtz, an exhibition catalog that explores the work of Lancaster portraitist Jacob Eichholtz (1776–1842). Art, however, is just one of the issues addressed in this publication. The catalog delivers on its promise of exhibiting the intersecting worlds of a man who cautiously navigated the tricky transition from metalsmith to painter, who prospered in a lively town nicknamed the "Conestoga Crossroads," and who won the patronage of the state's elites as well as its upwardly mobile citizens. And it succeeds in explaining Eichholtz as a product and agent of social change in the early Republic. Though the catalog has clear value for art historians, its interdisciplinary scope and sophistication should appeal to a wide range of scholars.	1
Eichholtz represented a particular kind of early American artist: the largely self-trained, rural painter who pulled himself up by brushes and bootstraps to attain a measure of regional renown. Unlike Copley or Stuart, figures ordinarily featured in art history textbooks, Eichholtz never went abroad to study. Nor did he achieve anything approaching an international or even national reputation. He was well informed about European aesthetics, however, and acutely aware that the title "artist" carried more weight than "artisan." And in this background and aspiration, he was an entirely representative early American painter. Born to second-generation German Americans who ran one of Lancaster's busy taverns, Eichholtz was apprenticed to a coppersmith at age fourteen. By 1808 he was successful enough to operate his own shop and sufficiently prosperous to commission a large portrait from James Peale, who was visiting from Philadelphia. Perhaps it was the experience of looking at his own portrait that made Eichholtz itch to paint. He began by adding decorative patterns to fire buckets and pots, and then took up profile painting, which was popular with middle-class patrons eager for quick, cheap portraits. Within five years, and schooled by the examples of Stuart and Thomas Sully, he had graduated to the bust-length canvas, a scale that challenged and forced improvements in his ability to "catch a likeness." At this point Eichholtz became somewhat unrepresentative of early American painters: he was extraordinarily prolific, completing some four hundred portraits by 1823, when he moved to Philadelphia in search of even greener pastures. In addition, unlike many self-trained artists, he demonstrated an uncanny talent for individualizing his sitters' faces. His poses were stock, the hands he depicted lacked bones, and the clothes he painted failed to conjure silk, wool, or cotton. Yet he could ably paint expressive eyes, fleshy cheeks, and dour lips. Perhaps this selective practice of mimesis was the secret to Eichholtz's success. It is all the more surprising, and somewhat regrettable, then, that he largely abandoned this way of working during the 1830s and adopted the saccharine style of sentimental figure painting that would dominate through the antebellum period.	2
The Worlds of Jacob Eichholtz was the first major exhibition of this painter in thirty-five years. It took place concurrently at three institutions: the Lancaster County Historical Society (project headquarters), the Heritage Center Museum of Lancaster County (now the Lancaster Cultural History Museum), and the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College. Museums have made a habit lately of organizing interrelated exhibitions, a strategy that enables them to capitalize on joint publicity and to highlight objects from their collections that might otherwise go unseen. In this case, as Thomas R. Ryan explains, the Lancaster County Historical Society simply had an abundance of stuff to show in the space available. What emerged was a unique regional collaboration with each site devoted to different aspects of Eichholtz's work.	. . .

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