Reviews for The painter's chair : George Washington and the making of American art

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

How fascinating it is to read about the creation and impact of portraits of George Washington, the first U.S. president, after the first African American president was elected on a tidal wave of digital images. Howard, the author of books about architecture and the Founding Fathers, tells the many-chaptered story of Washington's patient sittings in the painter's chair for his 28 ambitious and observant portraitists. By looking through artists' eyes, readers gain a new, intimate sense of the dignified and disciplined farmer, general, and president, and learn how Washington fostered nothing less than the birth of American painting. And what a cast of striving artists Howard profiles. John Simbert mounts America's first art exhibit in his Boston home in 1730. Charles Willson Peale, the first to paint Washington, served with him at Valley Forge. Painter John Trumbull creates a series of Revolutionary War paintings, and Gilbert Stuart paints the sensitive, unfinished portrait the world knows best. Presidential iconography is a fertile subject, and Howard's foundational contribution to the field is as thrilling as it is invaluable.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2009 Booklist


Choice
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

This engaging book presents a portrait of George Washington predicated on his encounters with the many painters who depicted him during the Revolutionary era. Calling on extensive primary source material, particularly diaries and personal correspondence, independent scholar Howard illuminates how the deification of Washington as the embodiment of the new nation helped prompt the growth of an American art market and a national visual culture composed of copies, engravings, mezzotints, woodcuts, and etchings. Howard opens with Washington's death at Mount Vernon and the manifold portraits and pictures that surrounded him. Then he returns to the beginning, chronicling the artists who sought audiences with the commander in chief and first president in order to establish their reputations as fine artists. They include Charles Willson Peale, French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon, John Trumbull, Edward Savage, Gilbert Stuart, and Rembrandt Peale. Although the book does not address the portraits themselves or the popularity of portraiture in Colonial America generally, it does present a dynamic picture of a young nation clamoring for symbols of nationhood and the artists who sought to capture that market by representing Washington. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. K. A. Schwain University of Missouri--Columbia


Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Art historian Howard (Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson, 2006, etc.) persuasively asserts the centrality of the first president to the first flowering of American painting. The American-born John Trumbull, Edward Savage, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale and his son Rembrandt all benefited from the early example of Boston's John Smibert and his Painting Room, and the training most received at the London studio of expatriate Benjamin West, "the American Raphael." In addition, they all painted the nation's premier citizen and "most essential symbol." Howard argues that by the time of his death, Washington had presided over not only the birth of a new nation, but also, as patron and subject, over the maturation of American art and the development of an unprecedented public appetite for portraiture and history painting. The author assigns walk-on roles to John Singleton Copley and Charles Bullfinch, and he recalls French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon's working visit to Mount Vernon and the extensive preservation efforts undertaken years after the president's death. He focuses, though, on the painters' stories, their remarkable cross-pollination and their encounters with the dutiful main subject who, notwithstanding his own irritability and impatience at posing, appreciated the importance of appearances and precedent and understood art's vital public function. Washington's encouragement of the artsaided by John Adams, Jefferson, Hancock and "the Nation's Guest" Lafayetteengineered a cultural transformation where, before the Revolution, few Americans had even seen a painting. Howard packs his lively narrative with interesting, sometimes amusing anecdotes: Stuart, first charming then exasperating Martha Washington; Jefferson stage-managing Trumbull's history paintings; Gouverneur Morris serving as a substitute model for Houdon; Savage's relentless self-promotion; Rembrandt Peale's near breakdown over trying to capture Washington on canvas. A novel, ingeniously executed approach to the inspiring man whose dollar-bill likeness is arguably the most reproduced painted image in history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.


Publishers Weekly
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Patron of the arts is not the first association one makes with George Washington, but Howard elegantly makes the case that the founder of the nation also helped establish America's art. Though architecture, not painting, was Washington's preferred art, America's first prominent artists painted him: Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, Benjamin West and Gilbert Stuart, the most distinguished American painter of the period. Washington, who Howard argues was "easier to see and admire than to understand," is subtly revealed in a narrative that is precisely paced and elegantly composed. Howard (Dr. Kimball and Mr. Jefferson) illuminates Washington as an eminent patron of emerging American artists, who "fostered nothing less than the birth of American painting." He also insightfully documents how Washington's evolving public image and often inscrutable character were diversely revealed by some of the most eminent visual artists of the 18th century, many of whose images propelled Washington's iconic status. This perspective will interest scholars of Washington and of early American art, as well as general readers seeking a refreshing angle on Washington and art in America. 8 pages of color photos. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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