The Death of General Wolfe

By the middle decades of the eighteenth century, it had become patently obvious that the public sphere in Britain had lost any credible resemblance to a classical republic of active and like-minded citizens...

THE OPENING OF THE NEW ROYAL ACADEMY at Somerset House in 1780 can be seen as a moment of triumph for officially ordained high culture in Britain. With its exuberant and sophisticated use of the classical orders, the building itself constituted an exultant proclamation of the Academy’s privileged relationship with the elevated cultural traditions of ancient Greece and Rome,...

~~John Vanderlyn had the world ahead of him. It was the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the young American who was living in Paris had already won acclaim for two powerful history paintings that had proven him to be not only up-to-date in his pictorial aesthetics but also strikingly political.

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...