Excerpt from Robert Feke: The Early Newport Portrait Painter and the Beginnings of Colonial Painting It is superfluous, in this presence, to say that the early colonists in this country found but small opportunity, and discovered but little inclination, for the practice of the Fine Arts. They were dedicated to toil and hardship, subject to privations, hurt by the inclemencies of a strange sky, forced to create their farms and homesteads by conquest of the forests, exposed to countless perils from the wild beasts and from the hostile savages whom they had dispossessed of the soil. They had no time to develop or to practice art. Their energies were consumed by the strenuous exertions through which they nourished, clothed and sheltered their bodies and defended their lives. They had often but little to offer as a reward or emolument to the artist, if any artist could have been found to serve them. Beyond these limitations from without, the colonists, at least those of British origin, were not people whose sentiments and tastes were favorable to art. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, outside of a few favored and limited areas, were, on the whole, a time in which art was declining in Europe. The brilliant achievements of painting in Holland, Flanders and Spain in the seventeenth century, were not accompanied by any equal achievements in architecture and sculpture. French art was grandiose, rather than great, or at its best was gay and pleasing through a lively and natural manner of treating trivial themes. Only a few English artists earned permanent eminence, and these in the eighteenth century, mainly in the one art of painting, in which portrait painting bulked conspicuously. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.