| American Portraits of the Federal period have, with few exceptions, been viewed as the work of artists with minimal training, usually described as documenting faces, clothing and the surroundings of their subjects, and, more recently as reflecting the social life lived by the patrons. Their place in a larger cultural discourse remains to be delineated. This dissertation examines the life and work of the little-studied American portrait painter Ralph Earl, 1751-1801. I read his paintings of the 1780's and '90's, along with other texts of the period as participants in the discourses of theatricality, nationalism, civic humanism, the marketplace, and various forms of representation. I describe his work as part of the visual culture through which Americans invented themselves as a nation.;Chapter one describes the anomalies of Earl's life and work compared with the period 'norm' and the ways in which his life and art read through each other. Chapter two discusses the constructed nature of the portraits as performances. A vision of life as performance permeates eighteenth-century rhetoric, literature, interest in self-presentation (witness the proliferation of deportment books and dancing schools), and in the marketplace. Just as theatrical metaphor was employed to give political events greater meaning, Earl and his sitters constructed a code which gives his paintings a significance greater than previously thought.;Earl was the first American commissioned to paint landscapes and to use specific landscapes as window scenes and backgrounds in his portraits. In Chapter three I look at their relation to the contemporary rhetoric and practice of landscape gardening, attitudes toward land, how it was used and depicted in town plans and maps, and how these modes of thought contributed to the establishment of an American character.;Chapter four examines the change in eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse from civic humanism to materialism and how Earl's portraits fit into and change this paradigm. I consider his work's significance in terms of the developing public sphere, as well as the ways American nationalism is represented. Bringing these discourses together, I discuss the ways in which Earl's work constructs an American identity. |
