Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America by Catherine E. Kelly (review)

After going bankrupt in 1821, Philadelphians William Waln and his wife Mary Wilcocks Waln sold their household goods. This auction included the visually stunning furniture commissioned from Benjamin Henry Latrobe in 1808, recently at the center of an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.¹ Of the original display one observer marveled at the "wealth and ambition & taste" that had arranged such luxuries into "the most beautiful [scene] I ever saw."² In the early Republic, taste was everywhere. Catherine E. Kelly's new book shows us just how far-reaching and meaningful it was in the material (and not just the rhetorical or political) world.

In Republic of Taste, Kelly argues that "the early national vocabulary of taste" (5) infused both political and everyday life. Ordinary people who were, in Kelly's words, "not intellectuals in any canonical sense of the word" (5) also deployed taste and its material manifestations, such as texts, fine art, and decorative objects. According to Kelly, they did so for two reasons. First, people used taste to build "cultural capital" and cultivate "personal pleasure" (5) in their everyday lives. The Walns' furniture provides a case in point. People also used objects of taste to claim citizenship in the new republic. Early American museum proprietors, for instance, boasted about the patronage of America's best-known citizens and governmental support (in the way of providing gallery space, for example) to suggest museums' "role in the creation of an enlightened citizenry" (162).

Kelly acknowledges that taste was a complex and "elastic" (7) concept in the early Republic. It was an idea that referred to Americans' ability, whether "inborn" or "acquired" (2), to identify, create, reflect on, or acquire things of "beauty" (6). These things included objects such as prints of George Washington (and later the marquis de Lafayette), portrait miniatures of beloved servants, and grand homes. Developing and exercising taste required experience in and opportunities to interact with the world "visually" (6). In the academies of the early Republic, people learned about what things should look like and, in some cases, how to make them. They displayed these items—such as pictorial needlework featuring figures from well-known paintings that "signaled" the maker's "republican commitments and her familiarity with the cosmopolitan world of engraved prints" (45)—inside their homes. They patronized museums where individuals such as Lucy Sumner could observe, reflect on, and discuss with acquaintances her take on "paintings, taxidermied birds, wax figures, and curiosities" (1). Americans' shared definition of taste, and knowing how and when to deploy it in private and public space, bound them together. It "advanced the public good and thus held out great promise in the American republic" (3), Kelly observed.

The "everyday life" of Kelly's book subtitle refers to things people did daily: they socialized, worked, cared for and remembered friends and family, shopped, lived, learned, and died. We might see this in contrast to extraordinary activities such as waging war or living through natural disasters.³ By talking about the material culture of taste in terms of mundane "commodities" (9), Kelly emphasizes the importance of things used regularly and sold in large numbers. Production's role was as important as consumption's, as evidenced by Kelly's detailed explorations into makers' influences, training, and salesmanship. If readers take away anything about the production and marketing of things in this period, it should be the precarious nature of making a living from peddling prints of individuals (such as Washington and Thomas Jefferson), whose popularity fluctuated depending on current events, or relying on admissions to museum exhibitions when patrons expected constant novelty.

With nuanced and patient analysis, Kelly explores how people used and made meaning from taste in educational, civic, and commercial settings. She first outlines how people learned to identify and cultivate taste, established and adapted from a British intellectual heritage, in formalized educational settings...