Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Early American Studies) - Softcover

"Lovell delights, astonishes, and challenges us with her insightful new readings of early American paintings and material culture objects."-Journal of the Early Republic "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 "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 "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 "Lovell's work reveals a mastery of her material and a broad understanding of early American culture."-Journal of American History

Focusing 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 conditioned by its source cultures and markets. Colonial material culture participated in a nonsubsistence international economy, deriving ideas, pigments, and conventions from abroad, and reexporting them in the effort to enlarge market opportunities or to establish artistic reputations in distant London. Exploring these and other key aspects of the aesthetic and social dimensions of the cultural landscape, Lovell concentrates on a cluster of central issues: the relevance of aesthetic production to social hierarchies; the nature and conditions of artisan career trajectories; the role of replication, imitation, and originality in the creation and marketing of art products; and the constituent elements of individual identity for the makers, for the patrons who were their subjects, and for the creations that were their objects. Art in a Season of Revolution illuminates the participation of pictures, objects, and makers in their cultures. It invites historians to look at the material world as a source of evidence in their pursuit of even very abstract concerns such as the nature of virtue, the uses of identity, and the experience of time. Arguing in favor of a more complex approach to research at the nexus of aesthetic and ideological concerns, this provocative new book challenges established frameworks for understanding the production of art in British America during the tumultuous decades bracketing the Revolution.