The Death of Major Peirson, 6 January 1781

This chapter is concerned with the way in which courtly fantasies involving blacks and Africa were absorbed and adapted by the increasingly self-confident urban populations emerging in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in London and Paris in particular. If the court remained the dominant cultural force in Italy, in Germany (whether Catholic or Protestant principalities), and in...

During the closing decades of the eighteenth century, years of revolutionary convulsions on both sides of the Atlantic, not only in politics but in all walks of life and thought and art as well, the ways in which blacks were regarded underwent profound and far-reaching changes ...

It seems deceptively easy to place John Trumbull in the development of American art. When the major artists of the preceding generation, Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley, remained in England after the War of Independence, Trumbull and Gilbert Stuart carried forward in America the arts of history painting and portraiture, respectively, during the early years of the Republic. Trumbull’s...