Description
Book SynopsisFocusing on the rich heritage of art-making in the eighteenth century, this lushly illustrated book positions both well-known painters and unknown artisans within the framework of their economic lives, their families, and the geographies through which they moved as they created notable careers and memorable objects. In considering both painting and decorative arts simultaneously, Art in a Season of Revolution departs from standard practice and resituates painters as artisans. Moreover, it gives equal play to the lives of the makers and the lives of the objects, to studying both within the interdependent social and economic webs linking local and distant populations of workers, theorists, suppliers, and patrons throughout the mercantile Atlantic.
Emphasizing maritime settlements such as Salem, Newport, and Boston and viewing them within the larger framework of the Atlantic world, Margaretta Lovell considers the ways eighteenth-century New England experience was condition
Trade Review
"Lovell delights, astonishes, and challenges us with her insightful new readings of early American paintings and material culture objects." * Journal of the Early Republic *
"Art in a Season of Revolution brings to brilliant culmination Lovell's nearly two decades of scholarship on portraits and decorative arts in eighteenth-century British North America. In my judgment, nobody rivals her ability to combine close attention to a work of art with deep research into the contexts of its production, cultural meanings, and reception." * Robert A. Gross, University of Connecticut *
"It's a wonderful book-which I read with great pleasure. Indeed it opened all kinds of worlds to me and it will to my students as well. . . . Throughout these chapters, the readings of pictures and what they signify are convincing and done with style." * Lawrence W. Levine, George Mason University *
"Lovell's book is as rich, subtle, and detailed as the portraits she examines. Lavishly illustrated, it is essential reading for historians of this period and indeed anyone with an interest in 'the visual turn.'" * American Historical Review *
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Artist, the Artisan, the Patron, and the Product
Ch. 1. Painters and Their Customers
Ch. 2. The Picture in the Painting
Ch. 3. The Empirical Eye: Copley's Women and the Case of the Blue Dress
Ch. 4. The remembering Eye: Copley's Men and the Case of Joshua Henshaw
Ch. 5. The Family: Painterly and Social Constructions
Ch. 6. The Drawing in the Painting
Ch. 7. Money, Art, Family, and the Cabinetmakers of Newport
