Privileging the Text, Subordinating the Image

Over the past half-century or so, some of the most frequently cited studies in art history have come from outside the field, many of them oriented toward one literary-critical or social-historical polemic or another. Produced by scholars with little or no training in the formal, theoretical, and interpretative modes of visual analysis, many of these works either inadvertently or purposefully relegate the images, objects, and structures around which they build their arguments to a subordinate position in their respective discourses. Exceptions have come either from scholars who acknowledge (if not fully adopt) art-historical methods or from scholars who successfully adapt the tools of their own areas of specialization to visual expression. Among the various areas within the discipline of art history, Anglo-American art of the eighteenth century has attracted more than its share of attention from nonspecialists, ranging from John Barrell's seminal works in the 1980s and 1990s to more recent offerings by Beth Tobin and Ernest Gilman.

The list of such studies in the history of early American art has continued to expand, as evidenced by two recent publications, both of which focus on the visual cultures of colonial and post-Revolutionary America. Barbara E. Lacey's academically rigorous From Sacred to Secular: Visual Images in Early American Publications samples woodcuts and engravings from a variety of print publications produced during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with a thematic focus on changes in the appearance (in both senses of the term) of sacred iconography. Hugh Howard's more interpretive The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art imagines a series of relationships among artists, sitters, and audiences, the scope of which ranges from portraitist John Smibert's 1729 arrival in Rhode Island through the death of Rembrandt Peale, who produced seventy-nine versions of his Patriae Pater portrait of George Washington between 1824 and 1860. Whether considered separately or as a pair, these books demonstrate some of the dangers and some of the rewards of working outside one's disciplinary comfort zone.

The Painter's Chair begins at the end, with the final hours in the life of George Washington. Thereafter, Howard shifts the dizzyingly episodic narrative forward and backward in time, from city to city and from America to England and Ireland and back again, reconstructing a series of vignettes from the lives of those to whom one might refer as "great men." Setting the context with John Smibert, the "shade" of whom reappears occasionally in the narrative, Howard characterizes the portraitist as the first real artist in North America, a reasonable claim by most standards. But less reasonable is one of the more puzzling conceits of the book: the author's choice to capitalize "painting room" and "painter's chair" as if they were universally accepted proper names comparable to Mount Vernon or Arlington House. And though Howard reassures his reader that his sources are well-researched and his narrative evidenced-based, the notes, which include little more than authors and page numbers, and the slight and partially outdated list of bibliographic sources suggest that his interests lie in concocting a story about artists and sitters rather than structuring and defending an argument about the mutually reinforcing relationships between painting, personages, and politics in the years leading up to and following the American Revolution.

In addition to John Smibert, the cast of characters in Howard's fictionalized account of George Washington and the artists to whom he sat includes Charles Willson Peale and his son Rembrandt, Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, Edward Savage, Gilbert Stuart, and Jean-Antoine Houdon. Supporting players are Martha Washington, her children from her first marriage and their children; the Marquis de Lafayette; various Founding Fathers; and the Marquis of Lansdowne, for whom the...