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WORK TITLE: Of Arms and Artists
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://paulstaiti.com/
CITY: South Hadley
STATE: MA
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NATIONALITY:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/people/paul-staiti * https://www.mtholyoke.edu/sites/default/files/acad/arthistory/docs/faculty/PaulResume.pdf * http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/of-arms-and-artists-9781632864659/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LOC is still down.
PERSONAL
Companion of Monika Schmitter (an art historian); children: Ivana, Adrian.
EDUCATION:University of Michigan, B.A., 1972; University of Massachusetts, M.A., 1973; University of Pennsylvania, Ph.D., 1979.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, assistant professor of art history, 1978-79; Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA, assistant/associate professor of art, 1979-93, Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation, 1993—. Curator of art exhibitions.
AWARDS:Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellow, 1975-76; Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, 1977-78; National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute, University of California, Berkeley, 1985; National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellow, 1986-87; Fellow, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies, 1987; National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 1990; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Winterthur Museum, Gardens, and Library, 1991; J. Clawson Mills Senior Fellow, Department of American Paintings and Sculpture, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991-92, 1998; Faculty Fellowship, Mount Holyoke College, 2006, 2012; Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fellow, Liguria Study Center, both 2006; Distinguished Teaching, Mount Holyoke College, 2009.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including The Italian Presence in American Art, Picturing Power: The New York Chamber of Commerce, Portraiture, and its Uses, and Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in the Early Republic, and journals, including American Art Review, Winterthur Portfolio, and Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.
SIDELIGHTS
Paul Staiti, a professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College, has written books and essays on several American painters, and he profiles five of them in Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes. He discusses the revolutionary-era lives and work of Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart, and how they influenced Americans’ view of the nation’s founding and founders. He deals with how the fight for independence affected their careers, and includes many color and black-and-white reproductions of their works, with analyses of the paintings.
The artists “breathed visual life into historical events and figures, and over the centuries their images have become out indispensable icons, the American equivalents of what the Iliad and the Aeneid meant to the ancient Greeks and Romans,” Staiti writes in his introduction. “We have come to believe in them and what they say about the Revolution and the Founders. They serve us as both historical documents and compelling mythology. And without them, Americans would not be able to feel as grounded as they are in their past, or as prepared to sustain their momentum into the future.”
Peale is most famous for his portrait of George Washington as a general in the Continental Army. The Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania commissioned the work, and the Continental Congress appropriated funds for it, with both bodies believing it would inspire patriotic feelings. The result depicted Washington as “the living embodiment of republican virtue,” Staiti writes. Peale was involved in other war efforts as well, such as confiscating the belongings of British sympathizers in Philadelphia. He maintained a busy career as a portraitist after the war, but always struggled financially. Stuart produced more than one hundred portraits of Washington, including the one that still appears on the one-dollar bill. The artist, however, remained neutral during the revolution, while his family stayed loyal to England and fled to safety in Canada. A friend called him the “greatest of our Artists” and the “most unprincipled of our Citizens,” Staiti relates.
Copley, who had been an in-demand portrait painter in Boston before the war, was a loyalist who decided in 1774 that it was prudent to emigrate to England. His half-brother had been aiding the British troops, and his father-in-law was the tea importer whose goods were tossed overboard during the Boston Tea Party, so his family was not exactly popular among supporters of the revolution, which Copley considered a civil war. West backed the patriot cause, but he had to be discreet about it, as he was the court painter to King George III of England. His balancing of private and public sympathies amounted to “a political high-wire act of the first order,” according to Staiti. Trumbull was an unabashed patriot; he traveled with Washington’s troops and painted battle scenes. He also spent some time studying with West in London, where he became involved with British subjects who were covertly aiding the revolutionaries. He was caught and ended up serving seven months in jail. After returning to the United States, he entered the new nation’s diplomatic corps. Over the next few decades, he worked on his epic painting of the founders crafting the Declaration of Independence, begun in 1786 and finished more than forty years later. It and three other Trumbull works still hang in the U.S. Capitol’s rotunda.
Several reviewers thought Of Arms and Artists an engaging, insightful book that places the artists in the context of history. Staiti “brings to life a war you may not know as well as you think you do — and artists whose idealism on canvas didn’t always align with their private lives,” reported Michael Upchurch in the Washington Post. In Historical Novels Review, Elisabeth Lenckos noted that Staiti’s “well-researched and elegantly written art-historical study … manages to fascinate and educate in equal measure.” Virginia DeJohn Anderson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, added that “Staiti’s group portrait permits comparisons of the painters’ various paths to artistic accomplishment and reveals the mix of cooperation and competition that shaped their careers.”
Weekly Standard contributor Amy Henderson observed: “What Staiti illuminates best is how each artist understood the historical importance involved in depicting the new nation’s Founders, but also how a painter would stamp his portrayals with artistic individuality.” Also, she said, he “reveals surprising interconnections among artists in the early republic and perceptively explains the impact of ‘republican virtue’ on revolutionary portraiture.” Upchurch found the author’s history a bit more compelling than his art criticism, saying: “Staiti, in casting an analytical eye on the paintings, can’t always compete with the dramatic lives he’s recounting. But he does drive home two points very effectively.” Those, Upchurch explained, are that “the art of the American Revolution was as much about ‘spin’ as documentation,” and that the founders’ rivalries “could give our present-day Congress a run for its money.” In a similar vein, a Publishers Weekly critic remarked: “Staiti skillfully shows how the Founding Fathers were attuned to the importance of visual art in constructing a public image.” In Library Journal, Jacob Sherman called the book “an excellent look at an understudied topic,” while a Kirkus Reviews commentator summed it up as “a lively, splendid history that captures the times with insight, acumen, and a juggler’s finesse.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Historical Novels Review, November, 2016, Elisabeth Lenckos, review of Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2016, review of Of Arms and Artists.
Library Journal, June 15, 2016, Jacob Sherman, review of Of Arms and Artists, p. 89.
New York Times Book Review, December 4, 2016, Virginia DeJohn Anderson, “Painting the Revolution,” p. 28.
Publishers Weekly, September 18, 1995, review of John Singleton Copley in America, p. 120; July 18, 2016, review of Of Arms and Artists, p. 199.
Washington Post, October 18, 2016, Michael Upchurch, “Our Country’s First Spin Doctors: The Painters of the American Revolution.”
Weekly Standard, December 5, 2016, Amy Henderson, “The Rebels’ Art.”
ONLINE
Bloomsbury Web site, http://www.bloomsbury.com/(April 5, 2017), brief biography.
Mount Holyoke College Web site, https://www.mtholyoke.edu/ (April 5, 2017), brief biography and curriculum vitae.
Paul Staiti Home Page, http://paulstaiti.com (April 5, 2017), brief biography.*
Paul StaitiArt Department, Mount Holyoke CollegeSouth Hadley, Massachusetts 010754135382244 4135382200 4135345145Fax: 4135382167I. Education●Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1979●M.A. University of Massachusetts, 1973●B.A. University of Michigan, 1972II. Positions●1993 Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation●Mount Holyoke College●19791993 Assistant/Associate Professor of Art●Mount Holyoke College●19781979 Assistant Professor of Art History●The Johns Hopkins UniversityIII. Publications●"The Capitalist Portrait," in Picturing Power: The New York Chamber of Commerce,Portraiture, and its Uses, New York, Columbia University Press, 2011●"Gilbert Stuart's Presidential Imaginary," in Shaping the Body Politic: Art and PoliticalFormation in the Early Republic, ed. by Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson,Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2011, pp. 162193●"Images and the Social Theatre of Colonial America," with Phyllis Hunter, PicturingUnited States History: An Interactive Resource for Teaching with Visual Evidence,American Social History Project, CUNY Graduate Center and the National Endowmentfor the Humanities, 2009●"Capital Portraits," CommonPlace, online journal of the American Antiquarian Society,7, no. 1, 2007●"American Artists and the July Revolution," American Artists and the Louvre, exhibitioncatalogue, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 2006, pp. 5471●"The Capitalist Portraits in the New York Chamber of Commerce," NewYork Journal ofHistory, 66, no. 3, 2006, pp. 4655●"Emilio Cruz: Life on Earth," Black Renaissance Noire, VI, no. 2, 2005, pp. 12837●"The State of American Art," Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France, exhibitioncatalogue, New Orleans Museum of Art and the University of Washington Press, 2003●"Con Artists: Harnett, Haberle, and their American Accomplices,"Deceptions andIllusions: Five Centuries of Trompe L'Oeil Painting, exhibition catalogue, National Galleryof Art and Lund Humphries, Washington, 2002
Paul StaitiArt Department, Mount Holyoke CollegeSouth Hadley, Massachusetts 010754135382244 4135382200 4135345145Fax: 4135382167●"Five Centuries of Trompe L'Oeil Painting," American Art Review, XIV, no. 5, 2002, pp.16877●"Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics," American Art, 15, no. 1, 2001, pp.1133●Emilio Cruz: Homo Sapiens Series, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the FineArts, 1997●John Singleton Copley in America, (coauthored with Carrie Rebora), New York, TheMetropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 1995, xiii + 348 pages; reprinted,Readings in American Art, ed. by Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, New Haven,Yale University PressSelected Reviews of John Singleton Copley in America:○John Updike, The New York Review of Books, 42, December 21, 1995, pp. 5963○Robert Hughes, Time, 146, October 9, 1995, pp. 7273○Hilton Kramer, The New York Observer, September 18, 1995○Robin Lippincott, The New York Times Book Review, November 26, 1995, p. 18○Pauline Maier, The New York Times, September 24, 1995, pp. 3436○Nancy Stapen, The Boston Globe, July 21, 1995○Alfred Corn, Art News, 94, May, 1995○Richard Saunders, EighteenthCentury Studies, 29, 1996, pp. 33435○Ellen G. Miles, The Archives of American Art Journal, 34,1996, pp. 2426●"John Singleton Copley in America, (coauthored with Carrie Rebora), American ArtReview, 7, no. 3, 1995, pp. 11823●"The Desire to Collect," Collective Pursuits: Mount Holyoke Investigates Modernism,South Hadley, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, 1993●"Ideology and Rhetoric in Erastus Salisbury Field's Historical Monument of the AmericanRepublic, "Winterthur Portfolio, 27, no. 1, 1992, pp. 2945.●"Illusionism, Trompe l'Oeil, and the Perils of Viewership," The Still Life Paintings ofWilliam Michael Harnett, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N.Abrams, 1992, pp. 3047●Samuel F. B. Morse, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990, xxii+ 300 pages●"Compliance and Resistance: Samuel F. B. Morse, Puritan in Arcadia," The ItalianPresence in American Art, New York, Fordham University Press, 1989, pp. 95105●"American Art in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum," (co authored with WendyWatson), The Magazine Antiques, 132, November, 1987, pp. 112231●Minerva Chapman, South Hadley and Washington, The Mount Holyoke College ArtMuseum and The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1986●"Rembrandt Peale on Art," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 90,no. 1, 1986, pp. 91109
Paul StaitiArt Department, Mount Holyoke CollegeSouth Hadley, Massachusetts 010754135382244 4135382200 4135345145Fax: 4135382167●"God, Family, and Art: Unpublished Letters from Samuel F. B. Morse," The Archives ofAmerican Art Journal, 25, no. 4, 1985, pp. 1015 Samuel F. B. Morse, New York, TheGrey Art Gallery, New York University, 1982, xi + 98 pages●"Ideology and Politics in Samuel F. B. Morse's Agenda for a National Art," Samuel F. B.Morse, Educator and Champion of the Arts in America, New York, The NationalAcademy of Design, 1982, pp. 753●"Samuel F. B. Morse's Search for a Personal Style: The Anxiety of Influence," WinterthurPortfolio, 16, no. 3, 1981, pp. 25381●"Rembrandt Peale's Portrait of Captain Paul Ambrose Oliver and His Daughter Mary,1825," Bulletin of The William Benton Museum of Art, I, 1979, pp. 314.●"The 1823 Exhibition of the South Carolina Academy of the Fine Arts: A Paradigm ofCharleston Taste?" Art in the Lives of South Carolinians, Charleston, The Carolina ArtAssociation, 1979●"John Ashe Alston: Patron of Samuel F. B. Morse," Art in the Lives of South Carolinians,Charleston, The Carolina Art Association, 1979●"Samuel F. B. Morse in Charleston: 18181821," South Carolina Historical Magazine, 79,April, 1978, pp. 87112IV. In Preparation●Copley, Adams, and the Treaty of Paris●John Trumbull's RevolutionV. Exhibitions●Curator, Emilio Cruz: Life on Earth, Landau Fine Arts, 60 drawings and Paintings, 2006●Curator, with Gail Feigenbaum, Victoria Cooke, David O'Brien, and Susan Taylor LeDuc,Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France, New Orleans Museum of Art, 2003; 270paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture, silver, documents, 200 page catalogue●Curator, with Carrie Rebora, John Singleton Copley in America, Museum of Fine Arts,Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; MilwaukeeArt Museum, 199596; 81 paintings, 348 page catalogue●Curator, Minerva Chapman, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum; National Museum ofWomen in the Arts, 198687; 87 paintings and drawings, 60 page catalogue●Curator, with Gary Reynolds, Samuel F. B. Morse, Grey Art Gallery, New YorkUniversity, 1982, 50 paintings, 98 page catalogue●Curator, with John Dobkin, Samuel F. B. Morse: Educator and Champion of the Art inAmerica, National Academy of Design, 1982, 122 paintings and drawings, 112 pagecatalogue
Paul StaitiArt Department, Mount Holyoke CollegeSouth Hadley, Massachusetts 010754135382244 4135382200 4135345145Fax: 4135382167VI. Fellowships●2012 Faculty Fellowship, Mount Holyoke College●2006 Fellow, National Endowment for the Humanities●2006 Fellow, Liguria Study Center, Bogliasco, Italy●2006 Faculty Fellowship, Mount Holyoke College●1998 J. Clawson Mills Senior Fellow, Department of American Paintings and Sculpture,The Metropolitan Museum of Art●19911992 J. Clawson Mills Senior Fellow, Department of American Paintings andSculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art●1991 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Winterthur Museum, Gardens, andLibrary●1990 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, Houghton Library,Harvard University●1987 Fellow, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies●198687 National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellow●1985 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute University of California,Berkeley●197778 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow●197576 Samuel H. Kress Foundation FellowVII. Recent Lectures●At the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the High Museum, Atlanta, the Graduate Center,CUNY; the NewYork Historical Society; Mount Vernon; Musée du Louvre; JeffersonMemorial Lecture, University of Virginia; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; YaleUniversityVIII. Awards●Distinguished Teaching, Mount Holyoke College, 2009
Paul Staiti
Art History Chair and Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation, Film Studies Steering Committee
Specialization:
American art; cultural history; film studies
Paul Staiti teaches courses in American art, architecture and film, including seminars on The Gilded Age and Reading the Hollywood Film. He's published on the artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse, still-life painter William Michael Harnett, and American portraitists Gilbert Stuart and John Singleton Copley. For Copley he co-curated an exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. He has also written on the portraits of nineteenth-century American capitalists and the late sea pictures of Winslow Homer. Now he is working on the group of portraits Copley painted in London of American diplomats, including John Adams, at the end of the American Revolution.
News Links
"Paul Staiti on the Tour de France," Office of Communications, July 9, 2009
"Paul Staiti--Faculty Award for Teaching," Office of Communications, February 26, 2009
"MHC Faculty Celebrated February 23," Office of Communications, February 9, 2009
"Questioning Authority Goes to the Oscars," Office of Communications, February 18, 2008
"Where Paradox Rules: The Delightful Trickery of Trompe L'Oeil,"College Street Journal, October 18, 2002
413-538-2244
pstaiti@mtholyoke.edu
Contact
208 Art Building
M 3:00-5:00PM or by appointment
Joined MHC: 1979
Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania
M.A., University of Massachusetts
B.A., University of Michigan
Curriculum Vitae
Website
Departments:
Art History
Architectural Studies
Film Studies
Biography
profile picturePaul Staiti, Alumnae Foundation Professor of Fine Arts at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of books and essays on John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Samuel F. B. Morse, William Michael Harnett, and Winslow Homer.
He has lectured at the Louvre, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has been the recipient of senior fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities three times.
He teaches courses on American art and architecture, as well as American cinema. In 2009 he was honored with Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teacher award.
He lives in South Hadley with Monika Schmitter, a historian of Venetian art. His daughter Ivana lives in Portland, OR, and his son Adrian lives with his family in Singapore.
Quoted in Sidelights: Staiti skillfully shows how the Founding Fathers were attuned to the importance of visual art in constructing a public image
Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters' Eyes
Publishers Weekly. 263.29 (July 18, 2016): p199.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters' Eyes
Paul Staiti. Bloomsbury, $30 (400p) ISBN 9781-63286-465-9
Staiti, a professor of Fine Arts at Mount Holyoke College, intertwines art criticism and history in this account of five American artists from the Revolutionary period . and the role their paintings played in constructing the narrative of the nation's founding. The artists--Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, John ' Trumbull, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart--created the images that have helped to define the Founding Fathers for generations. Staiti skillfully shows how the Founding Fathers were attuned to the importance of visual art in constructing a public image and how they collaborated with artists to, ultimately, shape history. The public was so enamored with Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Washington that one critic wryly commented, "[Washington} would be treated like an imposter when compared to Stuart's likeness of him." Adams stage-managed his portrait by John Singleton Copley, projecting his own symbolism into the painting with his deliberate choice of suit and positioning (he is depicted pointing to a map) to show a diplomatic mastermind. Staiti pays special attention to the way economic necessity drove the artists. Benjamin West's desire to retain his lucrative position in George Ills court kept him from displaying patriotic sympathies until the war's conclusion, while Peale travelled through British-occupied areas to paint portraits of American officers. Staiti shines when recounting the antics of the feckless Stuart, who often took payments for paintings he never finished. History buffs and art lovers will enjoy Staiti's refreshing perspective. Two 16-page color inserts along with black-and-white images throughout are included. (Oct.)
Quoted in Sidelights: an excellent look at an understudied topic
Staiti, Paul. Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution Through Painters' Eyes
Jacob Sherman
Library Journal. 141.11 (June 15, 2016): p89.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
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* Staiti, Paul. Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution Through Painters' Eyes. Bloomsbury. Oct. 2016.400p. illus. notes, index. ISBN 9781632864659. $30; ebk. ISBN 9781632864673. HIST
Staiti (fine arts, Mount Holyoke Univ.) offers an excellent look at an understudied topic: how the art world viewed the American Revolution. This rich narrative focuses on the lives of painters Charles Willson Peale, Benjamin West, John Trumbull, and John Singleton Copley along with portraitist Gilbert Stuart. (Stuart's rendering of George Washington appears on the $1 bill.) Each lived through the American Revolution and subsequently interpreted those events. What emerges is a story of artists whose imagery has lived on for nearly two and half centuries. These inventors lived in a world where painting certain subjects became a political act. Staiti underscores this by detailing how the artists went nearly bankrupt financially and emotionally. By crafting an informative narrative, Staiti allows readers to learn what meaning can be interpreted from the visual medium. The subject matter is similar to David M. Lubin's Grand Illusions: American Art and the First World War, and Robert Wilson's Mathew Brady: Portraits of a Nation. VERDICT Highly recommended for those who want to learn about the American Revolution, art history, and message in medium.--Jacob Sherman, John Peace Lib., Univ. of Texas at San Antonio
John Singleton Copley in America
Publishers Weekly. 242.38 (Sept. 18, 1995): p120.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1995 PWxyz, LLC
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Carrie Rebora and Paul Staiti, Erica E. Hirshler, Theodore E. Stebbins Jr., Carol Troyen. Metropolitan Museum of Art (Abrams, dist.), $65 (368p) ISBN 0-8019-5492-9
Solid scholarship and lavish production distinguish this study of one of Colonial America's leading painters, John Singleton Copley (1738-1815). Designed to accompany the currently touring exhibition of Copley's American works, this volume makes the case for the early Copley's importance both as an aesthetic innovator and as representative of his time and place. From his iconic portrait of Paul Revere at work to his haunting depiction of Mrs. Thomas Gage, the British general's unhappy American wife, the works that Copley produced before abandoning his native Boston for Europe in 1774 gleam with technical brilliance and have historical significance. Notable contributions to this catalogue include an overview of Copley scholarship by Rebora, associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; two lucid essays by Staiti, professor of art history at Mount Holyoke College, which treat the relationship between Copley and his commercial milieu in Boston; and studies by Met curators Marjorie Shelley and Morrison H. Heckscher, who examine Copley's pastels and the frames in which he set his early works, respectively. (Oct.)
OF ARMS AND ARTISTS
The American Revolution Through Painters' Eyes
by Paul Staiti
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KIRKUS REVIEW
How American art inspired a young country.
This is an impressive, ambitious undertaking, to tell the stories of five painters—Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart—while simultaneously showing how they were all interrelated and doing this against the complex history of the American Revolution. Staiti (Fine Arts/Mount Holyoke Coll.; Samuel F.B. Morse, 1990, etc.) begins his intricate narrative in January 1779. While the war waged, the Continental Congress approved funds to have Peale create a life-size portrait of “His Excellency General” George Washington. They felt strongly that art was “capable of arousing potent emotions in times of intense political change.” Staiti shows how these painters’ works “illuminated the era” when the population was in desperate need of inspiring images, rituals, and myths. Peele would go on to paint more than 100 more portraits. Copley, the “greatest painter in colonial America” and a loyalist, made many such contributions as well, until he felt he had to flee to London to protect himself and his family. West, known in England as the “American Raphael,” was born in Pennsylvania and served for more than a decade as King George III’s court painter. Peale and other Americans were students of his. He had to wait until he could express his patriotic sentiments in paintings, and his “luscious” painting of the Paris peace treaty signing was never completed. Trumbull, nearly blind in his left eye, served as Washington’s aide-de-camp and painted memorable battle scenes. His magnum opus is the majestic Declaration of Independence. Impulsive, witty, profane, and manic, Stuart, writes the author, was the “most talented of them all.” His numerous portraits of the Founders were conceived with a “brilliant talent never before seen in America.” Throughout, Staiti provides insightful, in-depth discussions of many key paintings, and the book is lavishly illustrated with illustrations and color plates.
A lively, splendid history that captures the times with insight, acumen, and a juggler’s finesse.
Pub Date: Oct. 18th, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-465-9
Page count: 400pp
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 22nd, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1st, 2016
Quoted in Sidelights: well-researched and elegantly written art-historical study
manages to fascinate and educate in equal measure.
OF ARMS AND ARTISTS
The American Revolution Through Painters’ Eyes
By Paul Staiti
Bloomsbury. 389 pp. $30
Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution Through Painters’ Eyes
BY PAUL STAITI
Find & buy on
This well-researched and elegantly written art-historical study, which examines the role painting played in promoting
the ideals of the American Revolution to contemporary audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, manages to fascinate and educate in equal measure. Staiti’s ‘portrait’ of the men—Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart—who were convinced that the production and collection of art was vital to the formation of the new Republic’s self-understanding, not only delves into their compelling biographies, but, by connecting their fates with those of history’s heroes, in particular George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, succeeds in highlighting the intricate symbiosis between art and ideology, as it manifested itself in the uncertain world of the late 18th century. As a result, the book traces the idea of painting as representative of our modern self-consciousness and shows that our notion of political celebrity might well have had its roots in the Revolutionary period.
Review
APPEARED IN
HNR Issue 78 (November 2016)
REVIEWED BY
Elisabeth Lenckos
Quoted in Sidelights: brings to life a war you may not know as well as you think you do — and artists whose idealism on canvas didn’t always align with their private lives.
Staiti, in casting an analytical eye on the paintings, can’t always compete with the dramatic lives he’s recounting. But he does drive home two points very effectively.
the art of the American Revolution was as much about “spin” as documentation,
could give our present-day Congress a run for its money.
Our country’s first spin doctors: The painters of the American Revolution
By Michael Upchurch October 18, 2016
In 1817, former president John Adams publicly declared: “I consider the true history of the American revolution, and of the establishment of our present constitutions, as lost forever . . . Nothing but misrepresentations, or partial accounts of it, ever will be recovered.” In a personal letter to painter John Trumbull, he added, “Characters and Counsels and Action . . . are always neglected.”
(Bloomsbury)
Trumbull, at the time, was working on the four huge paintings that still adorn the United States Capitol Rotunda, including “Declaration of Independence,” which features Adams front and center. It’s a dignified, orderly canvas — and that, to Adams’s mind, was the problem. It reflected little of the wrangling and rancor that, 40 years earlier, had gone into hammering out the political credos that shaped the country’s system of government.
“Of Arms and Artists” brings those turbulent negotiations to volatile life, while delivering unexpected ironies as art historian Paul Staiti uncovers the stories of Trumbull and his fellow artists Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West and Gilbert Stuart. Staiti addresses the wartime activities — or lack thereof — of artists who found themselves either on the battlefield or in awkward exile in London with their allegiances disguised or undeclared. And he drives home the point that the most talented iconmaker, Stuart, was as apolitical as they come.
Staiti takes his five painters in chronological order, starting with Peale, whose portrait of then-Gen. George Washington, commissioned by the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, was “the first piece of public art in the United States.” Peale fought under Washington. (One of his diary entries reads: “Finished the governors Portrait, the afternoon spent in Exercise of War”). He was also involved in confiscating Loyalists’ property in Philadelphia after the British abandoned the city.
“Peale imagined for himself a central place in America’s rising glory,” Staiti writes. But it wasn’t to be. Far from receiving postwar state support for his patriotic artistic efforts, he found himself navigating “the vagaries of the American marketplace without a financial lifeline.”
The colonies had always been an iffy place for an artist to make a living, and the other painters in the book spent significant time in London and/or Paris to advance their careers. West, although he quietly nursed Patriot sympathies, was George III’s official court painter: a tricky position to maintain during the war. His paintings on biblical, mythical or historical subjects were closely scrutinized for subversive content. Staiti calls his career “a political high-wire act of the first order.”
Portraitist Copley, who painted both American and British clients in his native Boston, ditched the blockaded city in 1774 when his situation there became untenable. His Loyalist half-brother was supplying Boston maps to the British; his father-in-law was the importer of the tea that got a dunking during the Boston Tea Party.
To Copley’s mind, “Civil War” — as he deemed it — was worse than tolerating British taxation and hubris in the colonies. Staiti’s details on families and communities divided by the conflict make it plain that “civil war” was exactly what it felt like. After fleeing to London, Copley was less successful than West in keeping his politics “calculatingly obscure.” But at least he avoided jail time.
Trumbull wasn’t so lucky. Staiti’s chapter on him reads like an episode out of AMC’s “TURN: Washington’s Spies.” In London, where he’d gone to study with West, Trumbull was pulled into the espionage activities of “radical British supporters of the Revolution,” landing him seven months in prison. Unlike Peale, he stayed engaged in politics upon his return to the United States, putting his artistic career on hold to become an American diplomat posted in London and Paris — one reason “Declaration of Independence,” begun in 1786, took him decades to complete.
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Stuart was the most trickster-like of the five. Staiti calls him “careless to the edge of recklessness, impulsive bordering on erratic.” His Loyalist family took refuge in Nova Scotia, but Stuart himself chose no sides in the conflict. One friend called him the “greatest of our Artists” and the “most unprincipled of our Citizens” — not what you’d expect of a painter whose name is synonymous with his 100-plus portraits of George Washington.
The book is furnished with 16 pages of handsome color plates, which give some notion of the paintings’ quality. It also supplies black-and-white reproductions of them on the pages where they’re mentioned, for handy reference.
Staiti, in casting an analytical eye on the paintings, can’t always compete with the dramatic lives he’s recounting. But he does drive home two points very effectively. First, the art of the American Revolution was as much about “spin” as documentation, often rendering peppery personalities, including Washington’s, in a misleadingly sedate manner. Second, bitter conflicts between the Founding Fathers — Washington vs. Thomas Jefferson, Adams vs. Benjamin Franklin — could give our present-day Congress a run for its money.
“Of Arms and Artists” brings to life a war you may not know as well as you think you do — and artists whose idealism on canvas didn’t always align with their private lives.
Upchurch is a novelist and a former book critic for the Seattle Times.
Quoted in Sidelights: Staiti’s group portrait permits comparisons of the painters’ various paths to artistic accomplishment and reveals the mix of cooperation and competition that shaped their careers.
Examining the Artists of the Revolutionary Era
By VIRGINIA DeJOHN ANDERSONDEC. 2, 2016
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John Singleton Copley’s 1768 portrait of Paul Revere. Credit VCG Wilson/Corbis, via Getty Images
OF ARMS AND ARTISTS
The American Revolution Through Painters’ Eyes
By Paul Staiti
Illustrated. 389 pp. Bloomsbury Press. $30.
A REVOLUTION IN COLOR
The World of John Singleton Copley
By Jane Kamensky
Illustrated. 526 pp. W.W. Norton & Company. $35.
One chilly December day in 1818, a skeptical John Adams entered Boston’s Faneuil Hall to view a painting. In his opinion, artists who depicted grand historical scenes, such as the image he had come to see, often distorted the truth and in so doing “conspir’d against the Rights of Mankind.” Adams did not report his reaction to this particular picture, but he almost certainly disapproved. The painting in question was John Trumbull’s “The Declaration of Independence,” which currently hangs in the rotunda of the United States Capitol.
Trumbull’s representations of key Revolutionary events, along with portraits by Trumbull and his contemporaries of such figures as George Washington, Samuel Adams, Paul Revere — and, yes, John Adams — now enjoy iconic status as a visual record of America’s founding. These images testify to the talents of a remarkable coterie of artists whose lives are explored in two new books. Paul Staiti’s “Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution Through Painters’ Eyes” examines the careers of Charles Willson Peale, Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull and Gilbert Stuart. In “A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley,” Jane Kamensky focuses her gaze on one of these men, whose world was turned upside down by American independence.
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Aspiring colonial artists faced daunting obstacles, including a lack of both skilled mentors and access to museums with exemplary works by ancient and modern masters. Staiti, a professor of fine arts at Mount Holyoke College, reveals how some painters strove to offset these disadvantages. Initially apprenticed to a saddle-maker, Peale took art lessons from a second-rate limner. Stuart learned how to draw faces from an untrained but naturally gifted African slave. Kamensky, a Harvard historian, describes a young Copley earnestly studying engravings of anatomical images, all the while worrying if he would ever realize his lofty goals.
The solution to this predicament was to go to London. Sooner was better than later, as the career of Benjamin West demonstrated. West left Philadelphia in his early 20s and never looked back. Honing his skills in the company of such eminences as Sir Joshua Reynolds, West specialized in epic historical themes and rose to the top of Britain’s art world. A founder of the Royal Academy, he became court painter to George III — an astonishing trajectory for an erstwhile provincial. Other colonial artists eagerly sought West’s patronage once they made it to the metropolis. In Copley’s case, however, what Kamensky identifies as an idiosyncratic “blend of caution and ambition” led him to postpone his trans-Atlantic journey and instead ship paintings to West for display and critique. By the time the 35-year-old Copley sailed at last in 1774, he was too set in his ways to achieve the painterly effects that might have earned him the high praise from London connoisseurs he desperately craved.
West’s royal appointment protected him from the financial distress that plagued the others, especially in colonial settings where art was more business than calling. American patrons preferred portraits to allegorical or historical subjects, and often demanded a degree of verisimilitude that stifled any impulse to artistic license. Paintings took a long time to complete and rarely generated enough income, forcing artists to seek revenue from cheap engravings of their work. Trumbull went so far as to solicit subscriptions to prints based on paintings he had not yet begun. In London, Copley’s schemes to charge admission to exhibits of his work cost him the respect of critics who disparaged his entrepreneurialism, which eventually lost him money. Stuart repeatedly fled his creditors and sometimes sold paintings to buyers other than the patrons who had commissioned them.
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When the Revolution erupted, these artists dispersed into various political camps. Only Peale and Trumbull staunchly supported the American side. Stuart remained “politically apathetic” throughout the conflict. West may have harbored sympathies for the rebels but suppressed them to retain royal favor. Marital ties to a prominent loyalist family shaped Copley’s allegiance, although he always insisted that he left Boston for Europe in 1774 to seek artistic advancement rather than escape political upheaval. Even so, as Kamensky shows, he remained conflicted to the end, bitterly fighting to retain his abandoned Boston property while struggling to reverse the downward slide of his professional fortunes in England.
These fine books approach the topic of Revolutionary-era cultural production from complementary angles. Staiti’s group portrait permits comparisons of the painters’ various paths to artistic accomplishment and reveals the mix of cooperation and competition that shaped their careers. With a singular focus on Copley and a more vibrant prose style, Kamensky probes deeply into such matters as family relations, local politics and the psychological costs of failing to realize one’s ambitions. The authors occasionally diverge in their pictorial interpretations. Take Copley’s famous “Watson and the Shark.” Staiti argues that Copley, adopting the style of Italian Renaissance masters, “aggrandized Watson’s personal adversity” to emphasize “heroic valor, with Christian overtones.” For Kamensky, the painting represents “a parable of redemption.” By commemorating the rescue of a drowning boy in Havana Harbor in 1749, the image alluded to Britain’s 1762 naval victory in the same setting. Copley first exhibited it in 1778 as the tide of the Revolution turned in America’s favor, offering viewers “an image of a war in which Britain might still prevail.”
“Watson and the Shark” convinced at least one English critic that the Boston-born Copley could be counted as one of “our Countrymen.” This statement raises the question: In what sense were these men “American” artists? All of them were born British subjects, and neither West nor Copley ever set foot in an independent United States. Kamensky acknowledges this ambiguity, noting that Copley is best known for pre-Revolutionary portraits now treasured as representations of “the spirit of an America the artist had never known.” Staiti, in the end, is less concerned with the painters themselves than with the legacy of their prodigious talents. Their collective works, he concludes, “are key elements in a visual repertory that Americans can call upon in order to understand where the nation came from and in what direction it ought to be going.”
One can imagine John Adams scowling at such a statement. He knew that Trumbull’s painting of the signing of the Declaration did not accurately depict the event — Adams, after all, was there. The stunning portraits now gracing the walls of American museums, as often as not, showed subjects as they wished to be seen, nestled in lavish settings with symbols of wealth and power. Indeed, having once sat for his own portrait by Copley, Adams later rejected the result as a “Piece of Vanity” inconsistent with genuine republican virtue. Any lessons posterity might have derived from this visual corpus misrepresented a Revolution that was far too contentious and rough-edged to be captured by the smooth application of paint to canvas, however skillful the wielder of the brush.
Adams had a point. The visual record of the Revolution commemorates eminent founders, not ordinary participants, and the signing of documents rather than the quarrels that accompanied their composition. It is, however, the only visual record we have. These paintings may not make manifest all dimensions of a tumultuous Revolution. But even Adams might agree that it is salutary for Americans to be able to picture Washington and his contemporaries keeping an eye on them.
Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s new book, “The Martyr and the Traitor: Nathan Hale, Moses Dunbar, and the American Revolution,” will be published in June.
A version of this review appears in print on December 4, 2016, on Page BR28 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Painting the Revolution. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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Quoted in Sidelights: reveals surprising interconnections among artists in the early republic and perceptively explains the impact of "republican virtue" on revolutionary portraiture.
What Staiti illuminates best is how each artist understood the historical importance involved in depicting the new nation's Founders, but also how a painter would stamp his portrayals with artistic individuality.
The Weekly Standard
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THE MAGAZINE: From the December 5 Issue
The Rebels' Art
Pictures from a revolution, and after.
DEC 05, 2016 | By AMY HENDERSON
'The Death of General Mercer at the Battle of Princeton' by John Trumbull (ca. 1789 - ca. 1831) Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
In today’s 24/7 media age, the public image of a president—or president-elect!—is inescapable. But how did Americans perceive their presidents before mass media captured them for wide distribution? What was the everyday citizen's visual conception of a leader whose visage was understood only through artistic rendering?
Paul Staiti tackles this interesting question in a new collective biography of the five most prominent portrait painters of the revolution and early republic: Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart. What Staiti illuminates best is how each artist understood the historical importance involved in depicting the new nation's Founders, but also how a painter would stamp his portrayals with artistic individuality. Each artist's perception of George Washington was decisively identifiable as Washington, but one artist may have emphasized the broad brow while another focused on the strength of Washington's jaw. Whatever the artistic differences, the intention was to portray a heroic revolutionary figure as an iconic symbol of the new republic.
When George Washington was born, colonial America lacked any artists of note. But the onset of revolution provoked artistic growth. Staiti writes that "war and art were unlikely but welcome companions." Young Charles Willson Peale began painting small portraits as a soldier, rendering miniatures for military comrades as "mementoes of service and sacrifice" and, sometimes, as memento mori for soldiers' families. For Peale, Staiti writes, the war "stimulated the urge to record and commemorate."
The artistic mentor for Peale, and most other leading American portrait painters, was Benjamin West, a native Pennsylvanian who had long supported the Patriot cause but who spent more than a decade "in the eminent post of court painter to George III, who was both his friend and benefactor." West "deftly navigated" his political inclinations in what Staiti calls "a political high-wire act of the first order." When the Provisional Treaty of Peace was signed in 1782, West assumed he could declare his own independence. He wrote Peale that he intended to compose "a set of pictures containing the great events which have affected the revolution of America" and asked his former student to send him detailed drawings that illustrated costumes and "the conspicuous characters" he would depict in his history paintings.
However well-intentioned, West never followed through and stopped work on the project in 1784. When John Trumbull had come to London to study with West, news of his military service in the Continental Army preceded him. He was arrested for treason in 1780 and only rescued from the gallows when West defended him in an audience with George III. Trumbull was imprisoned until 1781, when his bail was covered jointly by West and John Singleton Copley, another young American artist who had come to London to study with West.
West turned his revolutionary history project over to Trumbull, and over the next several decades, Trumbull created a dramatic narrative that would be showcased in the United States Capitol. In 1818, he completed Declaration of Independence and took the 216-square-foot painting on a triumphal tour across the Northeast before delivering the "GREAT NATIONAL PAINTING" to the Capitol. Trumbull's other enormous works were delivered in 1820 (Surrender of Lord Cornwallis), 1821 (Surrender of General Burgoyne), and 1824 (General Washington Resigning His Commission). All were "majestically installed with gilt-trimmed frames in the newly completed Capitol Rotunda in 1826, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This was now the symbolic center of the United States."
Another prominent portrait painter, John Singleton Copley, first left Boston for London in 1774, where he studied with West, kept quiet about politics, and "vigorously pursued his artistic career." Copley often painted American Loyalists, but is best known for his spectacular Watson and the Shark, which was shown at the Royal Academy in 1778. One of the most delicious stories recounted here is about the portrait John Adams commissioned from Copley in 1783. Along with Benjamin Franklin, Adams had just signed the Treaty of Paris, but Parisians ignored Adams and, instead, trumpeted Franklin's genius in a barrage of adoring portraits, medals, miniatures, and sculpture. It even became fashionable for Parisian men to wear Quaker-style hats.
Staiti writes that to remind people of his role in the history-making treaty, Adams hired Copley to paint "a colossal eight-foot-tall, full-length portrait." He viewed art as a visual statement about America's greatness, and he wanted posterity to recognize his contribution in a big, unmistakable way. The result was "a mammoth portrait spectacularly broadcasting Adams's significance. No one could overlook a picture so grand, nor now ignore the man who had valiantly waged peace abroad." Alas, once the portrait was unveiled, Adams was embarrassed by its hugeness: Copley's image was aggrandizing rather than virtuous. Ultimately, it spent years languishing in a London print shop before being hung in the Boston home of Ward Boylston. (It was too big to fit into the Adams house in Quincy.) In 1837, Boylston bequeathed it to Harvard College.
Perhaps the most interesting character was Charles Willson Peale, a brilliant and multitalented artist whose fame was launched with his 1779 portrait George Washington at Princeton. As Staiti writes, "This was a new day in the history of America, and Peale had condensed the new order of rule into a single image of Washington," capturing him as "the living embodiment of republican virtue."
Peale applied his view of heroic portraiture to a new gallery he was developing in Philadelphia: a hall of fame that would celebrate Revolutionary War heroes. In addition to "Portraits of Illustrious Personages," his museum would include everything that made the New World exceptional, including "a Collection of preserved Beasts, Birds, Fish, Reptiles, Insects, Fossils, Minerals, Petrifications." But the most notable Founding Father portraits were Gilbert Stuart's of George Washington. Washington was president when he first posed for Stuart in 1794-95. He had already posed countless times for Peale, Trumbull, and others, and once quipped that "I am now so hackneyed to the touches of the Painters pencil, that I am now altogether at their beck." Stuart's first portrait of Washington "set in motion an avalanche of commissions for more portraits," and over the next 30 years, he would paint more than a hundred portraits of Washington. Most were copies of his own originals, allowing the artist to mass-produce them.
Each of these individual portrait painters has been the subject of innumerable scholarly studies, and there have been occasional works with a more inclusive view, such as Hugh Howard's The Painter's Chair: George Washington and the Making of American Art (2009). But Paul Staiti has produced an overview that reveals surprising interconnections among artists in the early republic and perceptively explains the impact of "republican virtue" on revolutionary portraiture.
Amy Henderson is historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.