The visual arts played a major role in Ezra Pound's career. His poetry, especially The Cantos, testifies to a deep engagement with painting, sculpture, and architecture, and his essays reveal an aesthetics profoundly shaped by the visual arts. Conversely, as art critic, agent, and visual theorist, as well as poet, Pound directly contributed to early twentieth-century visual culture, and his writings, especially those on vorticism, have proved enduringly influential for subsequent generations of artists and critics. Pound's involvement with the visual arts was at its height from 1913 to 1924, the periods of early and high modernism, when he was living in London and Paris. But his education in the visual arts began not in early twentieth-century Europe, but in late nineteenth-century America.

PHILADELPHIA: 1885–1908

Pound was born at a moment when the United States was exhibiting an unprecedented fascination with European visual culture. During the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, the country experienced a rapid rise of interest in painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts as, following the Civil War, massive industrial growth fostered a prosperous leisure class seeking to invest in, and display, its cultural capital. The great private art collections, such as those of J.P. Morgan and Isabella Stewart Gardner, began to take shape, national art societies were formed, and the major art schools and museums were established: the Metropolitan Museum of New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts were founded in 1870, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1876, and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1879. European art dominated these collections: initially, the fashion was for the art of the French Salon and paintings by Old Masters, and by the end of the century the United States had become the major market for French Impressionist painting. A modified Impressionism had also become the dominant note in American painting, both in the work of celebrated expatriates such as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler, and residents William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, John Twachtman, and J. Alden Weir.