The arts in the United States have tended to be more democratic (and commercial) than their European counterparts. An egalitarian spirit permitted the popular arts to flourish and American popular culture to eventually attain global hegemony. The qualities that have long distinguished the American arts are pragmatism, simplicity, vigor, and accessibility. American authors pioneered the integration of literature and journalism. American musical theater is an oddly successful marriage of opera and vaudeville. Jazz has infused the humblest musical forms with the intellectualism and complexity of serious European music. And during the formative years of film, the great art form of the 20th century, Hollywood dominated commercially, technically and artistically.

Unlike well-respected popular American art forms like film and jazz that enjoyed the creation of new critical standards, however, illustration has always faced a particular handicap: though executed as drawings and paintings illustrations are not fine art, yet they have been critically assessed using criteria devised for judging the latter. It is not unusual for forms of expression to be similar yet distinct. Whether a performance takes place on a Broadway stage or before a movie camera, we call it "acting," yet we recognize that stage acting and film acting are distinct forms of expression. Although the materials—voice, expression, movement—are the same, the techniques are quite different. Just as the facial and vocal subtleties of film acting would go undetected by an audience in a Broadway theater, so the broad gestures and projected flair of theatrical acting would appear grotesque in the intimacy of the Hollywood close-up.

Rather than question whether these golden age illustrations are equivalent to fine art we would do well to accept illustration as part of a seamless spectrum of American pictorial expression. Adopting this approach is a first step toward understanding the intimate connection between American illustration and "serious" American painting. Between the Civil War and World War II, illustration and fine art were two sides of the same coin. Firsthand experience with illustration was common among American fine artists.

Excluding from consideration expatriates such as Sargent and Whistler, if one were asked to identify the greatest American painter during the period, the short list would undoubtedly include Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper—both of whom were prolific illustrators before becoming celebrated as fine artists. Both men’s mature works are unmistakably shaped for the better by the narrative complexity and pragmatic aesthetic of the illustrator’s craft.

Many well-known American artists—including George Bellows, John Sloan, William Glackens, Everett Shinn, and John Stewart Curry—worked as professional illustrators at some point in their careers. Regardless of their individual reasons for leaving the field, none ever excelled in the craft. For example, the illustrative output of Hopper, Sloan, and Glackens was similar to but not half as accomplished as the work of Frederic R. Gruger or Henry Patrick Raleigh. It is not that illustration work was beneath these fine artists. They simply couldn’t do it very well—no more than Gruger or Raleigh could have executed the paintings Sloan and Hopper are famous for.

The painted illustration was, 1880-1930, the most distinctly American sort of painting. Almost all notable American fine artists of the era had studied in France. Almost all of the illustrators were, however, homegrown products of American art education—The Art Institute in Chicago, the Art Students League in New York, Eakins and Eakins inspired classes in Philadelphia. A talented young artist with money went to France and returned to be a fine artist. An artist with the same talent but no money was educated in America and had to earn a living with his talent, and illustration was the most reliable living available to a talented artist in America.

The great illustrators were imitators of fine art, but also innovators in a new and evolving medium. The experience of creating art for reproduction and mass distribution alters the way in which the artist looks at, thinks about, and makes art. The innumerable fine artists who began as illustrators were altered by their apprenticeships. Their subsequent work was informed by the methods and particular aesthetic considerations of the illustrator’s craft. Moreover, the influence of American illustration on American painting in general is not limited to those artists who worked as illustrators. A painter growing up in a culture visually dominated by illustration could no more escape the influence of illustration than a contemporary filmmaker can avoid the influence of television on his or her aesthetic sensibilities.

Illustration’s place in the history of American art will never be defined to the satisfaction of everyone, but we should recognize that illustration was so woven into our national visual aesthetic that being aware of American illustration, appreciating its most talented practitioners, and properly assessing the scope of illustration’s influence is necessary to any rich understanding American art since the Civil War.