Visual persuasion: Portraits and identity among colonial artists and patrons, 1700-1776

Eighteenth-century English and American portraits are complex, culturally bound artifacts subject to the unique vision of artists and limited by patrons\u27 choices and popular artistic conventions. Limited documentary evidence survives for early portrait production, but it is possible to read the extant paintings as material, historical documents and begin to understand their meanings and roles in terms of the culture that produced them. Exploration of groups of paintings and prototypic mezzotint prints for common characteristics both across artists\u27 oeuvres and over time allows the scholar to uncover patterns in the material evidence and begin to answer such questions as how painters crafted images, what paintings reveal about cultural constructs such as gender roles, and why portraits look the way they do. Most importantly, colonial portraits have long suffered in their analysis from unproductive value judgments that have labeled them as inferior artistic products merely derived from English works. Specific inquiry into the portraits of London artists who were influential in the colonies such as Sir Peter Lely, Sir Godfrey Kneller, and Thomas Hudson reveals that the English painting tradition was equally derivative for reasons that served both painters and patrons in the supply and demand of the portrait marketplace. Comparative analysis of eighteenth-century English and colonial portraits reveals that, in terms of how artists worked and what patrons desired for portrayal on canvas, the American colonies were not a provincial backwater of artistic production, but rather an extension of the larger English culture abroad