CANR

• The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution - 2025 Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
• Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World - 2016 Yale University Press, New Haven, CT

• Zara Anishanslin website - https://zaraanishanslin.org/

  Scholar
  Historian
  Author
  Professor

  As a historian, I specialize in Early American and Atlantic World History, with a focus on eighteenth-century material culture. Since 2010, I have been assistant professor of history at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York. I received my PhD in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware in 2009, where my dissertation won the prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities that rated my thesis. In 2011, it also won the University of Pennsylvania’s Zuckerman Prize, a national award for the Best Dissertation in American Studies.

  From 2009 to 2010, I was the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. In 2013-14, I was a Mellon Fellow in the Center for the Humanities at CUNY's Graduate Center, and I spent 2014-15 as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in one of my favorite archival repositories, the New-York Historical Society. In fall 2016, I join the faculty of the University of Delaware. There, I will be a member of the departments of History and Art History, and at work on my new research project on the American Revolution.

  My love of history, fittingly, has its roots in my own past. When I was a little girl, my grandmother told me tales of our eighteenth-century ancestors, of Moravian missionaries (women and men) and soldiers in the American Revolution. I loved wandering among their graves with her, wondering about the lives of people long dead and buried. As a teenager, I often went to World War II reunions with her and my grandfather, who was a pilot in the Pacific. I listened with rapt attention as the men reminisced. But at some point, there always came a time when “women and children” like me were asked to leave the room. The veterans were about to discuss POWs, and death marches, and bombs, and other things too terrible, in their protective view, for our ears. This part I found frustrating. I wanted to hear all the stories the men told behind closed doors.

  When a Morehead scholarship took me to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I indulged my love of the past by majoring in History. But I also love books and poems, and so I double majored in Comparative Literature. Both fields of study called to me, but at some point it hit me: even the greatest writers can't make up more fascinating stories than what actually happened in the past. I realized that if I were a historian, I could use archives and museum collections to dig up the stories buried in those eighteenth-century graveyards, and to listen to those veterans' conversations behind closed doors. I could reveal hidden histories.

  My first book, based on my dissertation, is Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016). As its subtitle broadly hints, it taps into my long held wish to uncover-and share-hidden stories about the past.

  I feel lucky every day to be a professor. Even when I've got a pile of blue books to grade. Although they might not know it, my students regularly inspire me to delve into new research topics with format for college essays, and force me to sharpen my thinking.

  Since getting my PhD, I have taught history at Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University, as well as at the City University of New York. I teach courses for both undergraduate and graduate students in the history of early America and the Atlantic World. More specifically, I also offer courses on the methodology and philosophy of history, in historiography, in historic preservation and museum studies, on the American Revolution, and on material culture. At the University of Delaware, I look forward to teaching art history as well as history, adding courses on fashion history, historic interiors, and colonial portraits to the mix.

  Outside of my own classrooms, I've presented work at a number of colleges and universities, including the Université de Montréal, Washington College, the University of Pennsylvania, the College of William and Mary, Georgetown University, the University of Delaware, Columbia University, The Graduate Center of CUNY, NYU, Wesleyan, Johns Hopkins, and Oxford.

  I regularly attend and present my work at professional conferences, including those held by the American Historical Association, Organization of American Historians, the British Group of Early American Historians, the Anglo-American Conference of Historians, the Society of Early Americanists, and, most religiously, the annual meetings of the Omohundro Institute and SHEAR. I find thematically organized conferences especially invigorating and helpful, such as the American Revolution Reborn conference in Philadelphia (that's me doing Q & A there, in the photo above). I also relish the chance seminar culture provides to hold conversations about colleagues' work, and thoroughly enjoyed my stint as co-chair of the Early American History and Culture Seminar at Columbia from 2011-16.

  In addition to long term fellowships at the N-YHS, Johns Hopkins University, the Center for the Humanities at The CUNY Graduate Center, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies of the University of Pennsylvania, my work has benefited from research support and grants from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Huntington Library, the David Library of the American Revolution, the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, CUNY, the University of Delaware, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World at Harvard University.

• Zara Anishanslin new website - https://drzara.org/

  No bio.

• The American Philosophical Society website - https://www.amphilsoc.org/user/1621

  Zara Anishanslin
  2023-2025 David Center for the American Revolution Postdoctoral Fellow
  Zara headshot
  Zara Anishanslin (she/her) is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. She works on early America and the Atlantic World, with a focus on material culture. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. Her first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) was the Inaugural Winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Biennial Book Prize in 2018 and a Finalist for the 2017 Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians. Her current project, Under the King’s Nose: Ex-Pat Patriots during the American Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, forthcoming) garnered her support as a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Barra Sabbatical Fellowship from the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department. She has also been a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow in partnership with the Museum of the American Revolution, working to further innovations in doctoral training and seeking to build bridges between academia and the public humanities. According to her children, by far the most impressive thing on her CV is that she served as Material Culture Consult for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, “Hamilton: The Exhibition.”

• College of Arts & Sciences, University of Delaware website - https://www.udel.edu/academics/colleges/cas/units/departments/history/our-people/zara-anishanslin/

  Zara Anishanslin
  Associate Professor of History and Art History
  Director, Museum Studies & Public Engagement
  zma@udel.edu

  Resources and Links
  Zara Anishanslin's Personal Website
  Biography
  Professor Anishanslin specializes in Early American and Atlantic World History, with a focus on eighteenth-century material culture. She received her PhD from the University of Delaware’s History of American Civilization program in 2009 and won the Sypherd Prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities. She earned a BA in Comparative Literature and a BA in History with Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. Additional fellowships include grants from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, The Huntington Library, the American Antiquarian Society, Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center, The Library Company, Harvard Atlantic Seminar, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies, and the Winterthur Museum. Her first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) was the Inaugural Winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Biennial Book Prize in 2018 and a Finalist for the 2017 Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians.

  Anishanslin is currently a fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society, where she completed work on her forthcoming book, The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, July 2025). This project also garnered her support as a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Barra Sabbatical Fellow at the McNeil Center at the University of Pennsylvania, a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department, and a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow in partnership with the Museum of the American Revolution. As a Scholars & Society Fellow, Anishanslin furthered innovations in doctoral training and sought to build bridge between academia and the public humanities, a cause she is passionate about and strives to incorporate into her own career, as for example when she served as Material Culture Consultant for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s history exhibit, “Hamilton! The Exhibition.” In addition to teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses in history, art history, and material culture, she is an active public historian with professional and pedagogical experience in museum studies and historic preservation. She is the creator and co-host of the history podcast “Thing4Things” which is in production and premieres soon.

• The Junto - https://earlyamericanists.com/2016/10/06/qa-zara-anishanslin-portrait-of-a-woman-in-silk/

  Q&A: Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk
  October 6, 2016
  By Michael Blaakman
  in Review / Q&A
  1 Comment
  zaraheadshotToday at The Junto, Michael Blaakman interviews Zara Anishanslin about her new book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, which Alyssa Zuercher Reichardt reviewed yesterday. Anishanslin is an Assistant Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware—where she completed a prize-winning dissertation in 2009. In between earning her Ph.D. and returning to Delaware this fall, Anishanslin has been an Assistant Professor of History at CUNY’s College of Staten Island, as well as a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins University and the New-York Historical Society.

  THE JUNTO: Congratulations on your new book, Zara, and thank you for agreeing to answer our questions about it! One of the things I find most dazzling about Portrait of a Woman in Silk is its breadth. The topics you explore range from transatlantic networks of Enlightenment botanists to the political significance of female producers and weavers’ riots, from the domestic architecture of Philadelphia townhouses to the lifecycle of a silkworm—and much, much more. It reads like a total immersion in the culture of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World. But all projects have to start somewhere. What sort of questions inspired this book?

  ZARA ANISHANSLIN: Thanks, Michael, both for the interview and the kind words! I’ve been a big fan of The Junto/Yunto/Hunto from its inception, and so I’m particularly pleased to discuss my book here.

  Portrait of a Woman in Silk was first inspired by questions that arose from looking at things. While looking through silks in the Textile Study Room of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, I was struck by similarities between those mid-eighteenth century English silks and the dress in a Robert Feke portrait I remembered hanging at the Winterthur Museum. Admittedly, I partly recalled the portrait—not a famous one, by any means—because of jokes commonly made about its subject’s ample bosom. But it also stuck in my visual memory because of the flamboyant botanical design of its dress. Had Feke copied one of those English silks for his colonial American portrait? As it turned out, the dress in this 1746 portrait was one of those silks. And because the original watercolor design for the silk also survived at the V & A, we knew an unusual amount about this portrait and its silk. We had evidence of the identity of the London silk designer (Anna Maria Garthwaite), Spitalfields weaver (Simon Julins), Philadelphia wearer (Anne Shippen Willing), and New England painter (Feke). Very unusual for a colonial American portrait, to have this much information.

  Advertisement

  So then I really got intrigued. Here were four identifiable people—all literate, all financially solvent, and all connected to this silk and this portrait. And yet each was essentially unexplored by historians. Most likely this was in part because each left a very sparse trail in archival documents like letters, diaries, and probate inventories. But what each did leave behind was a trove of material and visual culture. What, I wondered, would happen if I used the things they created and used to bring their lives out of the historical shadows? What if I wrote a history that made a single object—and the lives embedded within it—the question? What if I looked at the histories of this object across space and time, from its stages of production to its distribution and consumption, and its use and display? How might a history of these luxurious commodities that encompassed production, consumption, and use complicate the traditional narrative of emulative refinement as driving force in transatlantic trade and colonial identity?

  JUNTO: Besides the portrait of a woman in silk itself, of all the objects you analyze in this book, if you could choose only one for teachers of the American history survey to feature in their course, which would it be and what would you want them to say about it?

  ANISHANSLIN: This might sound strange, but I would ask them to feature an object that no longer exists: the Willing’s Philadelphia townhouse. Partly this is a methodological choice. It’s important to remember and learn from objects that no longer exist as well as those that are extant. To use a simple example: if an archaeologist digs up an eighteenth-century latrine, she’ll find a lot of ceramics and little to no textiles. But obviously the people who used that latrine owned and used textiles as well as ceramics, and spent a lot more money on the fabric. If we only considered what’s physically there in the latrine, we miss a lot of history. So I think it’s important to remember to think about what’s absent as well as what’s present when we think about material culture.

  The Willing’s Third Street townhouse served as a place of business as well as a family home. Charles Willing ran his mercantile business from one of its front rooms, and sold goods—including enslaved people—from it. Willing imported fine textiles like that his wife wore in her portrait (and I argue that the painting was meant to advertise his trade). But he also was one of Philadelphia’s most active slave traders, and the house was home to at least four enslaved people, one of them a boy called Litchfield, as well as the white family. Along with Feke’s portrait, a portrait of Willing’s mother—a woman from Lichfield, the town that gave the slave Litchfield his name—hung on its walls. What was it like for Litchfield the enslaved boy to labor under the painted gaze of an elite woman from Lichfield? Thinking about the townhouse, a commercial as well as domestic space, occupied by a household of both enslaved and free people, allows us to place the things found in it—the luxury goods like portraits and silks—in their proper social context. Refined consumption is not the only story these objects tell.

  Advertisement

  JUNTO: Much of this book is about eighteenth-century people at work: the mental and material labor of producing stuff. We don’t have many labor historians nowadays. Do you consider yourself one?

  ANISHANSLIN: I am so glad you asked this question! You’re right to point out that this book is fundamentally about labor, both mental and material. Although I doubt many librarians would put it on the labor history bookshelf, to my mind this book is as much a labor history as it is a cultural one. It’s a history of the creative intellect and skilled manual production of things on both sides of the Atlantic. One reason thinking of this book as a labor history is important is that doing so highlights how women and men like Anna Maria Garthwaite and Robert Feke used their minds and hands to build the eighteenth-century material world. Garthwaite and Feke are both fascinating individuals in their own right. But if we think of their two lives as labor histories, their microhistories also lead us to the macrohistory of thousands of other laboring people. Thinking of this book as a labor history also highlights what I hope are two simple but big takeaways. First, that the eighteenth-century British Atlantic was a world and an economy created as much by women’s labor as by men’s. And second, that to understand colonial and revolutionary era American colonists—and their shifting place in the British Empire—we need to see them as sophisticated producers as well as avid consumers.

  JUNTO: Let me ask a bit about how you work. You describe Portrait of a Woman in Silk as “a methodological celebration of the unexpected illuminations and countless possibilities—the hidden histories—that object-centered scholarship yields” (21). For scholars who’ve only ever worked with text-based sources before, what’s your process when you sit down to analyze a portrait, or a stack of watercolor silk designs, or a lost or extant building?

  ANISHANSLIN: Nice segue. And you might guess from my thoughts on absent things that I’m very glad you brought up both lost and extant buildings. Whether or not the thing under study is still physically present does dictate the approach at a certain point. In many ways the approach is similar: I start by “reading” what I’m seeing, which often is as basic an exercise as describing the thing. If it’s still around, it’s crucial to see it physically, even if it’s a digitized image, for example. You always see something new when you actually see a thing. It’s crucial to measure it, to think about its physical attributes, and how it was made and used. If it’s something no longer present, of course, you rely on textual evidence and bless the people who bothered to list or describe things in account books or letters. With a single object like a portrait, you need to dig deep, following up on every possible bit of evidence about what’s in the portrait, and what you can learn about its sitter, its maker, and its display. With a whole typology of objects like a stack of watercolor silk designs, the approach is more one of breadth. Much the way you come to conclusions about someone’s personality after you read years of their correspondence, you can reach conclusions about someone’s inner workings by looking at years of their designs.

  Advertisement

  JUNTO: Each part of Portrait of a Woman in Silk opens with a microhistorical chapter, followed by thematic chapters that simultaneously dig deeper and expand to a macro level of analysis. The structure is intricate yet elegant; it feels effortless, but I’m sure it wasn’t. Can you pull back the curtain a bit and tell us about how you revised the dissertation into a book? What advice would you offer to early-career scholars who are currently engaged in that process?

  ANISHANSLIN: Actually, it was an entirely effortless process, written largely over the course of a two week vacation at the beach. So get on it, early-career scholars!

  Obviously, far from true. I’m delighted to hear that the book’s structure works for readers, as the actual writing of the book—its structure and its style—mattered to me almost as much as its histories. If we historians want to knock the Glenn Becks of the world off the best-selling history book lists and see PhD-trained historians on there instead, we need to pay attention to how we write as well as to what we write. I tried to write something that is at least moderately enjoyable to read. But it was a long, hard slog!

  In terms of diss-to-book and early career advice: one of the best bits of advice my advisor gave me was that “a dissertation is not a book.” How very true. This book began as a dissertation of four chapters sandwiched between the typical intro and conclusion. It is now a book in five parts, with a prologue and coda, and many smallish chapters (see long, hard slog above). This reorganization leads me to my second bit of advice: when you first submit your book for a contract, don’t worry too much about making it “perfect.” Readers will ask you to change it, anyway. Finally, the best advice I can give is to find a writing partner. Find someone you’re close to, who studies something similar but not exactly what you do, and get on a regular program of exchange and editing with him or her. Trust me, this is a life changing decision.

  JUNTO: Tell us about the poem that opens your book.

  Advertisement

  ANISHANSLIN: The poem was written by my father, Paul Anishanslin, to celebrate me getting my PhD back in 2009. A sentimental graduation gift. But when I restructured the book (see long, hard slog above), I decided that it would strike exactly the right evocative opening tone. A poem owes part of its beauty to its fragmentary nature, and this fragmentary beauty reminded me in many ways of the nature of material culture specifically, and of history more generally. Plus, it’s just a really lovely poem.

  JUNTO: What are you working on now?

  ANISHANSLIN: I’m working on a few projects related to the American Revolution. In the short term, this involves a few articles on the material and visual culture of the Revolution, which are at various stages of publication readiness. Eventually I plan to string these together into a synthetic history of the period from 1763-83. More immediately, I’ve started working on a book project that I’m very excited about. It’s the history of an enslaved man who painted portraits in Massachusetts and the London artist (likely also of partial African descent) he studied with around the time of the Somerset case. It follows their intertwined lives back and forth across the Atlantic, as the enslaved man—who was the property of Loyalists who fled to Britain—enlisted to fight for the Patriots, while the London artist moved to Philadelphia to paint the luminaries of the early republic. It’s a history of what it meant to be African and an artist in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, and a history of slavery and freedom in the revolutionary era told through art and war. I’m calling it “The Prince and the Pines.”

• Mount Vernon - https://www.mountvernon.org/about/news/article/author-zara-anishanslin-named-as-mount-vernons-georgian-papers

  Author Zara Anishanslin Named as Mount Vernon’s Georgian Papers

  About Mount Vernon
  News & Press
  Author Zara Anishanslin Named as Mount Vernon’s...
  June 14, 2018
  MOUNT VERNON, VA – The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington is thrilled to announce the selection of prize-winning author and historian Zara Anishanslin as its third Georgian Papers Fellow. The fellowship, funded by The Amanda and Greg Gregory Family Investment Fund, provides an opportunity for a scholar of the era of George Washington to work in the Royal Library and Archives at Windsor Castle, focusing on the papers of King George III, in order to cultivate fresh insights into the era.

  As part of the fellowship, Anishanslin will also receive an award of $10,000 and have the opportunity to share her research with the community of scholars and students at Kings College London—a premier British university. She is also a research fellow at the Washington Library, was selected based upon her significant scholarship on the life, leadership, and legacy of George Washington, as well as the broader mission of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.

  “We continue to be extremely excited about this relationship with Kings College London and the Royal Collections Trust,” said Mount Vernon president and CEO Doug Bradburn. “Zara Anishanslin’s work is extraordinary and driving the field forward."

  During this three-month fellowship, Anishanslin will spend one month in-residence at Mount Vernon and two months in Windsor, where she will conduct research for her next book, Revolutionary Things: Material Culture and the American Revolution, 1763-1788. This book narrates the history of how supporters of the American cause on both sides of the Atlantic used material and visual culture to organize protest, incite rebellion, wage war, and build a nation.

  The Georgian Papers Programme is a partnership of the Royal Library and Archives and King’s College London, as well as a number of American institutions including the Washington Library. This five-year project will build an open online collection of nearly 350,000 digitized items from the Royal Archives spanning the eighteenth century and containing the papers of Georgian monarchs.

  The Royal Archives—located at Windsor Castle—includes correspondence, maps, and royal household ledgers. As scholars work to digitize and analyze the records held in the archive, they will uncover new information about the history of North America and the transatlantic worlds of politics, trade, science, and religion.

  Both the Washington Library at Mount Vernon and the Archives at Windsor boast rich collections of documents, letters, and manuscripts that shed light on the period in which Washington’s life intersected with the life of King George III, who ruled Britain at the time of the American Revolution. Although George Washington and King George III never met, few men influenced each other’s lives or the path of the world in the 18th century as these two men.

  For more information about the Washington Library, which has hosted more than 50 scholars for residential fellowships since opening in 2013, please visit www.mountvernon.org/library.

Anishanslin, Zara. Portrait of a woman in silk: hidden histories of the British Atlantic world. Yale, 2016. 421p index afp ISBN 9780300197051 cloth, $45.00; ISBN 9780300220551 ebook, contact publisher for price

54-3410

HF3093

2015-955526

MARC

Anishanslin (history and art history, Univ. of Delaware) investigates the history of a single silk dress and the people involved in designing, making, purchasing, wearing, and ultimately painting this garment. By focusing on the cross-cultural history of a single item, the author welcomes readers to a world of aesthetics that formed a "kind of additional empire" within the British Atlantic World. Grounded in revealing the "hidden histories" of this world, the book provides a fascinating narrative of the lives of those connected with this garment. It highlights the importance of material culture and reminds readers that skilled labor formed an important component of the British Atlantic World. Anishanslin demonstrates the importance of consumerism, emphasizing how this object-based society transmitted not only goods but also specific ideas and tastes across the Atlantic. This not only strengthened cultural bonds but also gave rise to a trans-Atlantic consumer culture. Historians interested in epistemic communities, commerce, labor, production, culture, and a well-told story will find a stimulating text that sheds light on the interconnectedness of the British Atlantic World. Summing Up: *** Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--J. Rankin, East Tennessee State University

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Rankin, J. "Anishanslin, Zara. Portrait of a woman in silk: hidden histories of the British Atlantic world." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 54, no. 7, Mar. 2017, p. 1076. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A490476167/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3baf514c. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.

Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World

ZARA ANISHANSLIN

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016

421 pp.

This is an impressive, meticulously detailed narrative of the "imperial power" of silk designing, weaving, and consumption. Zara Anishanslin divides it into four major parts based on the narratives of the silk designer, the master weaver, the silk wearer in the United States, and finally, the painter who captured her in her luxurious silk. Then Anishanslin documents the history of these figures before she analyzes the social and historical context in which each worked and lived. (Her images include some amazing documents of eighteenth-century life--from the watercolors of silk design to the pictures of the banyan and of the painter Robert Feke's other portraits.) This book begins with the wide-ranging London silk industry, whose powers signify the range of cultural force often against the French but also operate as a sign of luxury in America (5). The one portrait of the silk wearer generates a history of consumption in a "transatlantic network" of a singular object with vast cultural meanings (10). Anishanslin's method illustrates the US silk explosion as a story of the political and material exchanges between England and the United States starting before the Revolutionary War.

Particularly striking in the first part--on the designer of botanically inspired silk--is the author's focus on the status of a female silk designer, especially one who had no training in silk design but who had an expansive knowledge of the landscapes and botanicals of her day, as well as the exchanges of botanicals between Britain and America. As a clergyman's daughter, Anna Maria Garthwaite, silk designer, was invested in designing flowered silks. Garthwaite had created a "cutwork landscape" in 1707, which illustrated her fine artistic skills and which meant that she used these skills in creating intricate designs (often of botanical images) (42, 61). These landscapes enhanced the "visual effects" of her designs (44). She advanced the rococo fashions of British culture, which extended to America, demonstrating the global trade of the eighteenth century. Spitalfields silk itself was "a thing of fashion" (129), and fashion itself illustrated the imperial power that Britain wielded. Garthwaite was also known for her flowered silk designs that highlighted the ordering of natural landscape and botanicals. In so doing, she created "memorable fashionability" and distinctive art instead of producing actual gardens or a family (69).

Simon Julins, master weaver, of the comfortable "middling culture," is the subject of part 2 (110). Julins was an expert at weaving silk flowers, a particularly exacting task. Silk weavers like Julins worked in "protoindustrial spaces" in guilds that had great political leverage (131). Working in such guild memberships, as Julins did, gave male artists clublike atmospheres where they could work with their own journeymen (135). His studio offered Asian and botanical silks to buy, which responded to Americans' interest in sericulture, and, as Anishanslin has it, Garthwaite's and Julins's skills were also fashion forward (109). This chapter also charts the riots about cloth costs--whether in cheaper cottons and calico or expensive wools and silks--along with arguments about the weavers' status as journeymen or master weavers (137). America also sent silk to English markets as a form of competition while additionally showing how American raw silk could compete with England's (141, 157). Perhaps more important, American women produced silk, even writing treatises on silkworms (159).

Part 3 is the most exciting section, on Anne Shippen Willing, whose decision to wear this damask flowered silk in 1746 was both a consumer and a cultural choice, showing her inclusion in a wealthy mercantile family. "Distribution, consumption, and display" of such silk meant that the British Atlantic world--in its global dimensions--had cultural influence even as America was demonstrating its trading in other commodities. Anne Willing's "sociable performance" in the four portraits she had of herself showed the force of urban transatlantic exchange, illustrating along with the Willings' wealth (partly from their Caribbean trade) her love of flowers (186, 201). That she advertised her family's wealth, gentility, and culture through an Americanized print also suggested how "asiatick" and British materials had to be adjusted for American use. This kind of designed silk had what Anishanslin observed as "symbolic importance" for those who bought and wore it (75). Willing "knit the empire" of Britain and America together, given the silk's joining together of London silk and American material wealth and natural history (82). Garthwaite's knowledge of plants appealed to the Willings so much that they advertised this pleasure in this portrait. And Garthwaite's English rococo style appealed to the Willings for its ornateness and distinctiveness.

Yet Anne Shippen Willing was no sericulturist, but instead the wife of Philadelphia's mayor and thus a key to cultural power and consumption. "Portraits and silk, in this case," the author notes, "helped to create a common visual language of empire" (178). By studying this singular portrait, Anishanslin extends her reach from the detail of silk design to the interaction of America and Britain as rival powers. Though we know little about Anne Willing herself, we do know what her flowered silk signified in the eighteenth century, since even a single portrait was beyond the means of most Americans. Finally, Anishanslin carefully analyzes the roles of the enslaved people in the Willing household, as well as the Willings' desire to use the visual presence of their own slave trade as part of the United States' symbolic power (for a significant analysis of US slavery in this context, see especially page 205). In addition, Anne Willing gave this dress to her sister-in-law for the latter's own portrait to show the silk luxury (even at ten years old) again and again, so influential was Spitalfields silk and so important the familial vision of capitalist growth.

In part 4, Anishanslin focuses on the painter Robert Feke, a "natural genius" and "genteel artist" who was a mariner-turned-painter (227, 234). This section follows through on American styles of painting in the mid-eighteenth century, including Feke's spectacular portrait of Anne Willing in 1746. For Anishanslin, Feke was a particular kind of colonial painter, depending on "shared visual experience and material reality" of mid-eighteenth-century Americans, and thereby his paintings "created a visual sensus communis" (238). Feke's art offered Americans a sense of the "North American landscape" along with a secure view of their own imperial powers as a "regenerative site for the British empire" (244)--maintaining that the future of Britain's powers were to be found in America (248). Creating and painting this "new Eden," Feke used Anne Willing as representative muse-art object--or at least her clothing as an intense view of the culture itself: in the way that references to Milton and Paradise Lost, of enslaved African Americans, of damask silk itself all proved a certain sense of luxury and achievement in the mid to late 1700s. Lucrative families like the Willings included silk owning with their power of enslaving African Americans.

So many of the details of this study have an immediate impact upon other eighteenth- and nineteenth-century US fictions, such as the enslaved African Americans in E. D. E. N. Southworth, the ball in Rebecca Rush's Kelroy (1812), the Indian silks in Ann Stephens's novels, and the advertisements of "the fantastic rounds of dissipation" in Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791). Rebecca Rush fills Kelroy with descriptions of the material luxuries that Mrs. Hammond, the duplicitous mother of the heroine, has in mind. Here is Rush's list of them: "Dress, public amusements, frequent, and extravagant entertainments, ... cards" along with the "mortgage of her little farm" (98). Such luxuries mean a symbolic power in Rush's world; such object-centered scholarship as Anishanslin's might give us a new clue about the novel's republican moral schemas. This study is a model for how to disentangle the means of luxury from the cultural institutions that produce and celebrate such wealth--from the lottery that Mrs. Hammond wins to sustain her impression management to the Indian businesses that Kelroy has to pursue. Anishanslin's book teaches how to analyze such objects in the thick descriptions she delivers.

Anishanslin's "object-centered scholarship" (21) offers a much-needed way to think about possession and exchange between two cultures. This study starts with "the silkworm" and ends with the author's coda about the history of the dress that generated her analysis. It opens questions of damask silk production in the United States, including the stories of the singular women who pursued goals in such design. This ambitious project works in its inspirations about reading objects, like silk dresses, in their material history. The true pleasure of this book is its expansive and creative range. With her nuanced, sharp perspective, Anishanslin makes good on her opening promise to offer the "human histories" behind the silk itself, and she delivers a rewardingly complex conclusion on the "unraveling empire" of the British Empire and the emergence of "new empires" on both sides of the Atlantic (312).

DALE BAUER University of Illinois

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 University of North Carolina Press
https://uncpress.org/journals/early-american-literature/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Bauer, Dale. "Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World." Early American Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, winter 2018, pp. 223+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A535943285/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=58903ebc. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.

Anishanslin, Zara THE PAINTER'S FIRE Harvard Univ. (NonFiction None) $32.95 7, 1 ISBN: 9780674290235

A capacious view of patriotism.

Art historian Anishanslin takes a fresh perspective on the American Revolution by focusing on three artists whose work inspired rebellion and patriotism: Robert Edge Pine, a British painter likely of African descent; Prince Demah, an enslaved portrait painter; and Patience Wright, an American wax sculptor who ran a London wax museum. Less known than John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, and Gilbert Stuart, the three were famous among their contemporaries; their clientele spanned the political spectrum, and their art, seen in exhibitions and reproductions, shaped public opinion in Britain and the colonies. Moreover, besides producing art, each contributed to the revolution in other ways: Demah as a soldier, Wright as a patriot spy, and Pine as the founder of popular museum culture. Demah was brought to London by his self-serving enslaver, who recognized his rare artistic talents and planned to publicize him for her own benefit and arrange for him to study with a professional artist to further develop his skills. On the voyage abroad, he served both as a valet to his owner and as a mariner on the ship. Fortunately, the artist who took him on as apprentice was Pine, an ardent supporter of American liberty. Wright, a successful sculptor in the colonies, was a widow with five children when she decided to go to London to establish herself there. With a letter of introduction to Benjamin Franklin from his sister, Jane, Wright found support to launch her new career. Soon, her networks included aristocrats, politicians, and merchants, from whom she easily gathered intelligence that she passed on to Franklin. "Not all Patriots were white," Anishanslin writes. "Not all Patriots were men." The fight for freedom raged beyond combat.

A stirring, thoroughly researched history.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Anishanslin, Zara: THE PAINTER'S FIRE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325637/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=43c5182e. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.

* Anishanslin, Zara. The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution. Harvard Univ. Jul. 2025. 400p. ISBN 9780674290235. $32.95. FINE ART

Anishanslin (Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World) offers a captivating narrative that illuminates the transatlantic artistic and political landscape during the American Revolution. The book centers on pivotal artists-Patience Wright, Prince Demah, and Robert Edge Pine--who shaped revolutionary culture. Skillfully interweaving their stories, Anishanslin highlights how these artists, often overlooked in historical accounts, contributed to the visual and material representations of patriotism. One of the book's strengths is exploring the complex networks of artists, spies, and intellectuals who supported the American cause from both sides of the Atlantic. The portrait of Prince Demah is particularly compelling. He journeyed from enslavement to freedom and played a role in the patriot cause; his portrait offers a perspective on the intersection of art and politics. The rich historical context and exploration of the broader cultural impact of the art enhances the narrative. This book significantly contributes an understanding of the American Revolution's cultural underpinnings. VERDICT Anishanslin offers a compelling blend of historical insight and artistic analysis, making this a valuable read for those interested in revolutionary history and art.--Lawrence Mello

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
Mello, Lawrence. "Anishanslin, Zara. The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 6, June 2025, pp. 92+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847199270/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0fba753f. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.

Rankin, J. "Anishanslin, Zara. Portrait of a woman in silk: hidden histories of the British Atlantic world." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, vol. 54, no. 7, Mar. 2017, p. 1076. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A490476167/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=3baf514c. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025. Bauer, Dale. "Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World." Early American Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, winter 2018, pp. 223+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A535943285/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=58903ebc. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025. "Anishanslin, Zara: THE PAINTER'S FIRE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325637/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=43c5182e. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025. Mello, Lawrence. "Anishanslin, Zara. The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution." Library Journal, vol. 150, no. 6, June 2025, pp. 92+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847199270/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0fba753f. Accessed 16 Oct. 2025.

Word Count