The Constructed Self in Colonial American Portraiture

Portraiture was the most widely commissioned type of painting in colonial America. This dissertation seeks to explain the prevalence of portraiture by examining its cultural function. To this end, I speculate that portraits were one means by which colonial Americans fulfilled an eighteenth-century inclination to explore identity and construct selfhood. This process of self-definition occurred through imagined interaction between represented sitter and viewer, a dynamic exchange with implications for the identities of both. My investigation of the cultural functions and meanings of colonial American portraiture builds from scholarship in art history, history, literature and literary theory, and social psychology. Chapter one integrates this body of scholarship with portraiture studies and argues for the interactivity of portraits. The theoretical bases for this argument derive from a review of eighteenth-century history and social practices, as well as the ideas of twentieth-Century Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin. In the next three chapters I consider portraits of different segments of the colonial population created in densely-settled regions on the East coast. I have adopted a case study approach in which I carefully examine individual portraits, situating them within the social, historical, and psychological contexts of eighteenth-century Anglo-American culture in order to gain a deeper understanding of the many forces that impacted the production of portraiture in the Atlantic colonies. In chapter two, I investigate the cultural function of portraits of Boston area merchants painted by John Singleton Copley. Copley's portraits of merchants, including Isaac Smith, Harrison Gray, Nicholas Boylston, Robert "King" Hooper, and Jeremiah Lee, promoted the appearance of politeness and sociability between represented sitter and viewer that mitigated contemporary negative connotations of mercantilism. Chapter three queries the ways colonial women Julia Stockton Rush, Margaret Kemble Gage, and Mercy Otis Warren may have explored identity through portraiture, among other conversational forms of cultural expression. In chapter four, I interpret colonial portraits of children, namely Justus Engelhardt Kuhn's Henry Darnall III and Eleanor Darnall, and William Williams' portraits of Deborah, William, and David Hall, as artificial, theatrical entities that facilitated interaction between youthful sitters and their audiences to shape and reflect the latter's definitions of childhood.