Rooms with a view: Landscape representation in the early national and late colonial domestic interior

This dissertation examines the patronage and function of overmantel and other painted landscape views in the American home during the early national period. I begin by focusing on the overmantel landscape painting commissioning practices of elite Anglo-American patrons from the Carolinas to New England, in the period from the Seven Years War to the American Revolution, which sets the scene for the narrower case studies that form the body of the dissertation. By connecting individual commissions for landscapes across the British American colonies, I argue that rather than being isolated examples these understudied commissions were parts of a broader taste for landscapes installed above fireplaces in the British Atlantic World. Deriving from Atlantic travel, the international exchange of architectural pattern books, and the desire to establish gentlemanly status in the Americas, British Americans were engaging in a transatlantic trade in landscape overmantels as acts of social and political identity formation. Three case studies form the body of the dissertation: landscape overmantels and marine scenes from Salem, Massachusetts; a series of paintings and furnishings from the homes of prominent Baltimorean merchants; and miniature picturesque plantation landscapes of the Carolina Low Country. By focusing on sets of objects from three regions located in and around important centers of economic and cultural exchange in the early republic, I study how Americans in various regions of the country invested the landscape with competing meanings. In doing so my work explores a genre of landscape representation that has all too often been left out of the history of American art, thereby yielding new insights into late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century American conceptions of nature, home, land, and empire.;In sum, this dissertation examines early American landscapes within the context of European imperial and artistic relations within the Atlantic world. This approach to the American landscape challenges the existing literature of American landscape as an allegory of American nineteenth-century national identity by considering the impact of ideologies of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism on landscape representations of the early United States. By using a comparative approach to specific case studies from the southern, mid-Atlantic and northeastern regions of the United States, early American landscape paintings are inserted into greater art historical discourses about the display strategies of early modern paintings, debates about construction and illusion in the decorative arts, and the political and social constructions of landscape in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century.