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George Fuller: The Hawthorne of Our Art

SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH of American painter George Fuller (1822-84), an art critic wrote: "In him we have lost the greatest American painter, the Hawthorne of our art."'1 In dozens of contemporary journals and newspapers, other critics expressed similar views. Fuller's lofty status, however, did not prove lasting. By the 1930s his most famous paintings were vanishing into museum vaults, while new scholarship revised the pantheon of greatest American painters. Such a tale of diminishing fame is anything but unusual; it might be told of countless once-popular and successful artists. More interesting is a consideration of the qualities that made Fuller's art so beguiling to his nineteenth-century audience. This essay seeks to identify and examine those cultural and aesthetic factors that helped to create the virtually unique contemporary perception of Fuller as Hawthorne's equivalent in painting. The intention here is not so much to evaluate Fuller's independent aesthetic achievement as to recreate and analyze the light in which his paintings were