Franklin and His Friends: Portraying the Man of Science in Eighteenth-Century America (review)

This volume does not include biographies of Benjamin Franklin and his friends. In fact, it is not biographical in any usual sense, though it offers information about the lives of American and British artists, almost all of whom were "natural philosophers," as men of science were called in the eighteenth century. Benjamin Franklin, one of the most distinguished scientists of the century, figures as a representative figure who knew many of the subjects of the portraits reproduced in this catalogue. And catalogue it is--not a conventional work of history or biography--but a lovely study filled with pictures, many in color, which make up an exhibition mounted by the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian.

The focus of the exhibition and book is unusual: natural philosophers, or at least men who had a genuine interest in science. The pictures chosen for the exhibition are portraits for the most part, but portraits carefully composed to show the learning and scientific interests of their subjects. Franklin, for example, is present in several portraits. He wears his bifocals in all of them, testimony to his genius and his inventiveness. In the great portrait of him painted by Charles Wilson Peale in 1789, he is dressed in a blue banyan, conventional attire for a scholar-scientist. A quill pen sits nearby, and Franklin holds the tip of a pointed lightning rod, while a rod with a rounded tip lies near his left hand. In the background, one can see a jagged bolt of lightning striking a brick building. Resting next to the pen and inkwell, Peale shows a passage from Franklin's Experiments and Observations, his great work on electricity and lightning. Peale has included two kinds of lightning rods as a reminder of the controversy their designs excited early in the century. The conclusion of the authors of this catalogue--that Franklin's holding of the pointed rod, which he favored, was by 1789 "a political and nationalistic statement" (130)--seems faithful to what we know of both the art and science of the century.

The text of the catalogue, which is carefully organized to match the illustrations, covers subjects of interest to students of both eighteenth-century painting and science. The discussion of painting is, as the authors intended, of greater interest than the information provided about science and the instruments used in its study. The catalogue opens with a short review of "The Man of Science in America," and then offers a detailed analysis of how artists went about the job of painting some of the most important scientists of the century. Much of this discussion, I suspect, will be familiar to art historians, but not necessarily so to the rest of us. Of particular interest to me is the chapter on "banyans" and their use in identifying scientists and scholars. The reproductions of tools--mathematical and optical in particular--maps, diagrams, and botanical specimens are also skillfully rendered and explained.

The final chapter, which attempts to place the paintings and their subjects at the end of the century, after the American Revolution, raises questions that might be developed usefully by both art historians and historians of science. The assumption of the catalogue is that the revolution "created" a nationalistic sentiment that evoked a fresh image of the American scientist. The development of this insight is necessarily brief, and at times borders on the banal. But it is well illustrated in the exhibition and in this catalogue, and the point is surely important enough to deserve additional study. Franklin and His Friends indeed is a fine achievement and returns much pleasure and profit.