This is episode 99 of the Memory Palace podcast, as well as the third episode I am producing

for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as its artist in residence.

Now this story can be listened to anywhere but in a perfect world, you would be listening

to it in gallery 735 in the American Wing at the Met.

This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate Demayou.

The nation was brand new.

And it needed new everything, essentially.

A Navy and economic system, models and symbols and office supplies.

And it needed artists to celebrate and articulate

Americanist to its citizens into the world beyond.

Whatever Americanist turned out to be.

Now artists are not a Navy or even letterhead when you get right down to it.

But at the beginning of the Republic, at a moment of boundless possibility, in a certain

youthful idealism, they were a nagging unchecked box in the founding fathers to do

list.

John Vandolin was born the year before the declaration in 1775 in Kingston, New York.

His father was a painter, though his old man could never quite make a living at it.

He installed windows and sold paint and brushes to get by.

And his son was determined to be more.

More than his dad, sure, that's just the normal order of things.

But John wanted to be more than just a painter.

...