The Face of the Public

In two of the more influential accounts of America's transition from eighteenth-century colony to nineteenth-century nation, the body has been identified either as antithetical to the disinterestedness of civic republicanism or as instrumental to the development of a more democratic community based upon a common discourse of affective experience.¹ Alternatively, I propose that the body's negative relationship to the public sphere, on the one hand, and its positive relationship to a culture of performance, on the other, were also mediated by a third entity: the legibility of permanent moral character upon the face. Postrevolutionary culture, I would like to suggest, was also characterized by the desire for a permanent, involuntary, and visible relationship between the face and moral character—what Richard Sennett has described more generally elsewhere as the "involuntary disclosure of character" (24)—which arose, in part, as a response to social and political anxieties generated by the fluid culture of performance that critics such as Jay Fliegelman, David Shields, and Nancy Ruttenberg so ably document.

I seek here to complement recent explanations of the body's relationship to the public in the postrevolutionary period by situating two texts—Philip Freneau's "The Picture Gallery" (1788) and Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792–1815)—into the contemporary discourses of portraiture and physiognomy that they invoke. Following the recent work of art historians John Barrell, Wendy Bellion, Dorinda Evans, Brandon Fortune, Margaretta Lovell, and Ellen Miles, I explore how postrevolutionary American culture—its public portrait galleries, waxwork figures, prints, sculpture, profile portraits, silhouettes, and printed biographical portrait galleries—utilized the face to represent the abstract ideals of civic virtue and communicate exemplary character and thus participated in creating what Robert St. George has called a "visual national imaginary" (302). My analysis focuses specifically on why the rise in postrevolutionary public portraiture would be described as a political liability by Freneau in "The Picture Gallery" and as a possible benefit for the democracy by Brackenridge in Modern Chivalry. Freneau's "The Picture Gallery" identifies the rapid expansion in access to portraiture, the growing commercial self-interest of the portrait painter, and the rise of public portrait galleries of distinguished Americans (such as those assembled by Charles Willson Peale, Pierre Du Simitière, James and Ellen Sharples, Charles B. F. Saint Mémin, and Joseph Delaplaine) as symptoms of a larger generic crisis in the civic function of portraiture. The problem with public portraiture, as Freneau conceives it, is that its emergent political benefit—the representation of abstract republican virtues (such as disinterestedness) to the public—is being undermined by its residual social function—the signification of distinction. As a result, portraits end up identifying civic virtue with the faces of particular persons rather than communicating it through them. In contrast, Brackenridge defends public portraiture on the grounds that its representations of the face can counter political dissimulation and serve the public interest in the new democracy. Various episodes from Modern Chivalry reveal how, on the one hand, the facial features of subordinate groups might be used to exclude them from embodying exemplary public character, while on the other, physiognomically informed portraits might be used to embody otherwise abstract political ideals in the faces of specific individuals. The asymmetries in Modern Chivalry's application of the logic of physiognomic distinction to the public—individual and politically inclusive for dominant groups, collective and politically exclusive for subordinate groups—provides us with a postrevolutionary precursor to the epistemology of race in America, one in which the representation of racial difference consists not simply in the opposition between white and black or master and slave, but in whether a person's face first identifies the essential features of his individual character or his collective identity.²

Freneau and the Problem of the Postrevolutionary Portrait

When "a person of any condition whatsoever, have he but as much money as the painter asks," can sit for a portrait, "this is a great abuse" (165) wrote the artist Gérard de Lairesse, because portraiture should teach "posterity to emulate the same virtues" (164) as those displayed by the sitter.^3...