Whose Affirmative Culture?: Response to Pfister

The great object I had was . . . to give by that art a conquest that was made over native people without sword or dagger.

Benjamin West, quoted in Robert C. Alberts,
Benjamin West, A Biography

When Benjamin West identifies his art with "a con quest . . . over native people[s]" (111), the bland certainty of his tone suggests that for him the connection between art and conquest is obvious. His tone is imperialist: West was a British Loyalist, and the painting to which he refers, William Penn's Treaty with the Indians of Pennsylvania (1771), celebrates the British colonization of the Delaware River valley. In West's image, conquest is a land sale, negotiated by William Penn (1644-1718) in 1682 under the legendary "treaty elm" at Shackamaxon, near present-day Philadelphia. ¹ In a gesture that conflates colonial commerce with brotherly love, trade goods with the treaty text, Penn opens his arms to "the Indians of Pennsylvania." With one hand he indicates a scroll, held by the Quaker at his right, while with his left hand he gestures to a bolt of white cloth offered by a merchant in exchange for the riverfront land where Philadelphia will one day rise. As historian James H. Merrell notes, West's scene of peaceful purchase has had a long life of its own in American mass culture, finding its way onto "everything from curtains and quilts to gravy boats and tavern signs, from Christmas cards and children's toys to an insurance company calendar and an advertisement for cough medicine" (Into 30). Perhaps because West's famous history painting is also an article--if not an emblem--of American consumer culture, critics have only recently begun to fully analyze the image's aggressive combination of artifact and ideology.

Recent readings of Penn's Treaty by Merrell, Anne Cannon Palumbo, and Beth Fowkes Tobin vividly demonstrate the extent to which the painting relies on an array of historical distortions, omissions, and imperial iconographic traditions. ² As analyses of imperial myth making, these historical and art historical readings are indispensable. Taken together, however, they encourage us to ask a further question: what exactly is it we take to be the most important, most powerful form of the painting's historical dissemblings? I would argue that the most telling and powerful form of its dissembling inhabits the painting itself as a work of history, its basic assumptions about the production and dissemination of historical knowledge and, in particular, its assumption of a necessary relationship between historicity (i.e., the status of being historical) and the "arts" of commodity production, distribution, and consumption. My discussion of Penn's Treaty therefore engages the topic "History in the Making" by criticizing the history-making juncture of "history" with "making" itself in the colonization of North America by the mechanical arts of a European industrial power.

West's assertion that art can give--and make--a conquest was not only imperialist; it was also industrialist. In 1771, Britain was a manufacturing empire and the arts that "made" its conquests were inseparable from the mechanization of commodity production. West's use of the word "art" denotes not only West's own art of history painting, but also the eighteenth-century arts of British manufacturing; in Penn's Treaty these arts are epitomized by the bolt of white cloth held up by the merchant at the painting's center. The boxes and bolts of British imports on display in the painting make the relationship of the arts of industry to the creation and satisfaction of consumer desire central to its meaning. But they also raise the question of exactly how we are to understand the relationship of Penn's Treaty to the wider horizon of eighteenth-century British industrial and commercial expansion.

As an expatriate Pennsylvanian living in England, West had begun to receive many of his painting commissions from...