T. Lawrence Larkin

Politics and Portraits in the United States and France During the Age of Revolution: A Joyful ABC Book T. Lawrence Larkin

The portraits examined in this book highlight the challenges artists faced in the conceptualization, concretization, and promotion of political identity in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Portrait scholars T. Lawrence Larkin, Brandon Brame Fortune, Philippe Bordes, Amy Freund, and Margaretta Lovell provide thematic introductions dedicated to separate trends in the fashioning of Revolutionary and Federal/Imperial identity including the challenges of representing a strong leader, republican assembly, free citizen, and the uncovering of overlooked people or patterns. These thematic introductions are followed by essays that offer case studies of artists negotiating the desires and interests of their prominent patrons including Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, among others. These essays analyze how artists in the United States and France grappled with how abstract notions of individual liberty, delegated powers, and collective governance can be invested in drawn, painted, printed, or mapped likenesses of high-ranking individuals during the Age of Revolution.