Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America, and: Benjamin West: Allegory and Allegiance (review)

Matthew Pratt's painting The American School (1765) will retain its privileged status in the canon of eighteenth-century art history if only by virtue of its depiction of key British-American colonial artists who came to London to study in the studio of their countryman, the successful expatriate Benjamin West. In the painting, Pratt (the cousin of West's wife) is seated in front of an easel and canvas and holds a palette, maulstick, and paintbrush. He pauses in his activity, as do the other artist-students, to listen to West's critique of a work-in-progress. Facing the viewer is Pratt's canvas, upon which only the faintest outlines of a figure are discernible. Recently identified by one scholar as an imagined muse, her representation, it is argued, suggests the "American School" students' aspiration to become history painters. More generally, this painting is interpreted as exemplary of "provincial" Americans' eagerness to imbibe the aesthetic techniques, styles, and theories codified in the "metropolis" by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Discourses. Reynolds's treatises on art theory positioned history painting as the most prestigious branch in the hierarchy of painting, with other genres, including portraiture, falling well beneath it. In a chapter devoted to the study of artists' portraits that include a smaller portrait or work embedded within the format of the larger, actual portrait, Lovell challenges the widely accepted notion among scholars that these early American artists relied wholesale on British models of art theory. Instead, she argues that these portraits, when viewed as objects to be studied when the written record is nonextant or where it "yields a thin harvest" (27), reveal a unique American theory of art.

Using an abstract and concrete vocabulary readily understood by their contemporaries, these artists challenged Reynolds's dicta via the canvas rather than the written word, thus wittily positioning the project of portraiture (synchronically and diachronically) on an equal footing with history painting. She writes that "despite their transatlantic experience—[these artists] theorized the act of painting differently than their English peers," but like them, "understood portraits to be primarily social agents as well as records that participated actively in power hierarchies, family obligation, and the construction of memory" (26–27). Lovell's analysis prompts further tantalizing questions. For example, how did West's professional rivalry with Reynolds influence the content of other paintings under consideration in this chapter, specifically West's Self-Portrait (1806), which Lovell positions as another example of his defense of the portraiture genre?

Whether examining single paintings or objects, or working with them as sets, Lovell's stated goal is to depart from the standard trajectories applied to studies of American art and material culture. Looking to the "ordinary zones of private life" rather than to the "stage of public events" (vii), she places these highly codified objects within the larger framework of the Atlantic world and focuses on the eastern seaboard urban settlements of Boston, Salem, and Newport. Lovell counters much recent scholarship such as that which claims artists during the prerevolutionary period had venues for public exhibition—such arguments she finds "problematic" since "envy" is "key to their social psychological readings" (3). She shows instead that such artworks typically circulated within the private, domestic sphere. Examining the objects (paintings, silverware, cabinets) in their most microscopic as well as their most macroscopic connections to culture, Lovell would also see these artworks "staged and restaged within both local and vast interdependent social networks" (270) that relied on transatlantic trade and the burgeoning consumer revolution. With the advent of the Revolution, both artists' and artisans' venues for marketing came to a standstill, as that shattering event signaled social and economic devastation...