William Dunlap
William Dunlap
1766 - 1839
American painter, writer and Playwright. After working in England with Benjamin West between 1784 and 1787, Dunlap concentrated primarily on the theatre for the next 20 years. His two main interests are documented in his large Portrait of the Artist Showing his Picture of Hamlet to his Parents (1788; New York, NY Hist. Soc.). He wrote more than 30 plays and was called by some the ‘father of American drama’. He was the director and manager of the Park Theatre in New York from 1797 until its bankruptcy in 1805 and again, in its revived form, from 1806 to 1811. He began to paint miniatures to support his family in 1805 and travelled the East Coast of America as an itinerant artist. By 1817 he had become, in his own words, ‘permanently a painter’.
Dunlap always lived on the verge of poverty. To increase his income, he produced a large showpiece Christ Rejected (1822; Princeton U., NJ, A. Mus.), which was probably inspired by West’s painting of the same subject (1814; Philadelphia, PA Acad. F.A.). Though he exhibited it with considerable success, his later religious and historical canvases were not so well received. Dunlap resigned his membership of the American Academy in New York in 1826 to help Samuel F. B. Morse found the rival National Academy of Design, of which he became treasurer and later vice-president. In 1827 he turned again to the theatre, writing three more plays. Casting about for a profitable venture, he began his History of the American Theater, published by subscription in 1832.
Dunlap spent his last years writing reviews for the New York Mirror and working on his most important publication, the History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, a comprehensive compilation of biographies of artists working in America. Arranged chronologically according to the date when each artist began his professional work in the USA, the book includes sculptors, engravers and architects but deals most fully with painters. It comprises 287 lives of artists, varying in length from one line to many pages, and an appendix with brief accounts of 176 more. With little source material available to him, Dunlap based his biographies on material solicited directly from the artists, their friends and relatives. In many cases he used the artists’ autobiographical contributions without alteration. In other instances he invented dialogue to establish character, making use of his skills as a playwright to create a convincing narrative. He also drew heavily on his own wide experience, recorded in extensive diaries. His expressed goal was to produce a lively account that would both appeal to the general reader and fulfil an educational function. The biographical form, he wrote, ‘admits of anecdote and gossip’.
Dunlap’s book is full of exhaustive detail and has its heroes (Benjamin West) and villains (John Trumbull). His approach is factual, anecdotal and opinionated, not theoretical. There is very little critical analysis of art, and his judgements are moral rather than aesthetic. Subject-matter was of greater interest to him than style. The work for this book was accomplished in only two years, yet its overall accuracy remains unchallenged, especially in the material relating to the period of Dunlap’s own lifetime. The vivid biographies led one critic to call Dunlap ‘the American Vasari’. In spite of some shortcomings, the book is a remarkably complete record of early American artists and is still the single most valuable source of information on many of the artists, containing much primary source material and preserving important facts not recorded elsewhere. [Leah Lipton. "Dunlap, William." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T024057.]
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