After Neal had accumulated sufficient wealth and influence toward the middle of the nineteenth century, he began patronizing and uplifting artists in the Portland, Maine area. Painter Charles Codman and sculptor Benjamin Paul Akers both became steadily patronized as a result of Neal's encouragement, patronage, and connections. Neal also helped guide the work and careers of Franklin Simmons, John Rollin Tilton, and Harrison Bird Brown. Brown became Portland's most successful artist of the nineteenth century. Comparatively constant is Neal's taste for bold, unlabored approaches to painting that utilize "an offhand, free, sketchy style, without high finish". The same could be said of Neal's "fantastic mixture of common sense and absurdity, of intelligent observation and dross" that portrays Neal the art critic as "melodramatic, addicted to exaggeration, superficial, inconsistent, ill-informed, naive". These descriptors apply less to his final essays on art (1868 and 1869) that conspicuously lack the qualities of Neal's boastful, confident, and passionate style in the 1820s. His opinions from that earlier period "to a remarkable degree... have stood the trying test of time." Poetry The bulk of Neal's poetry was published in The Portico while studying law in Baltimore. His only bound collection of poems is Battle of Niagara, A Poem, without Notes; and Goldau, or the Maniac Harper, published in 1818. Though Battle of Niagara brought him little fame or money, it is considered the best poetic description of Niagara Falls up to that time. Poems by Neal are also featured in Specimens of American Poetry edited by Samuel Kettell (1829), The Poets and Poetry of America edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1850), and American Poetry from the Beginning to Whitman edited by Louis Untermeyer (1931). Drama and theatrical criticism Neal authored two plays, neither of which were ever produced on stage: Otho: A Tragedy, in Five Acts (1819) and Our Ephraim, or The New Englanders, A What-d'ye-call-it?—in three Acts (1835). Neal wrote Otho hoping it would see production with Thomas Abthorpe Cooper in the lead, but Cooper showed no interest. Written in verse and heavily inspired by the works of Lord Byron, John Pierpont considered the play too dense and wrote to Neal that it needed "a sky-light or two" cut into it. It was also described as "at once both mystifying and trite". Neal brought the script with him to London with plans to revise it and have it produced for the stage while he