The board included Everett, Dexter, and Longfellow, and a mix of prominent Bostonian businessmen, artists, and other notables: Joseph Andrews; Thomas G. Appleton; Edward C. Cabot; Alvan Fisher; Nathaniel Langdon Frothingham; James B. Gregerson; Chester Harding; Joshua H. Hayward; George S. Hilliard; Albert G. Hoit; Jonathan Mason; Benjamin S. Rotch; G. G. Smith; Charles Sumner; C. G. Thompson; and Ammi B.
[3] The union aimed to promote excellence in art, to single out top performing American artists, and to educate the public eye.
[5] The board considered their purpose as part of a national effort to raise the quality of American visual art, ideally on par with the greats of Europe and the ancient world.
In our republican land, genius cannot receive this munificent patronage, but, by the establishment of art unions, the sovereign people can stimulate and educe merit under the combined influence of those urgent springs of action -- emulation and recompense.
The divines, statesmen, soldiers and writers of New England, fostered by public applause and patronage, have given high proof of their merit, and we regard the Art Union as destined to elevate the character of our artists.
Art-Union, it is because it is new, and because I know that the men who direct it are gentlemen, in the true sense of the word; and am fully confident that they will not domineer, and dictate, and calumniate, and make false pretences about the value of their prints and paintings, and puff the servile daubers who submit to them, and declare that the country produces no better works than theirs, and that all who are not their loyal subjects are of no account at tall, and that they have 'declined' their works.
Such a line of argument, affecting to despise their opponents, yet covertly stinging them with envenomed sneers and lies -- such blackguardism the Managers of the New England Art Union cannot possibly commit, because they are gentlemen.
[20] In 1852 the union issued its Bulletin, "embellished with a well executed sketch of the engraving [of Washington Allston's painting of Saul and the Witch of Endor], and a woodcut, spiritedly designed by Hammatt Billings, in illustration of Mr. Longfellow's ballad, 'The Skeleton in Armor.