Academic literature on the topic 'American Portrait painters'

The 1599 portrait Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons, Pedro and Domingo by Andean artist Andres Sanchez Gallque (Figure 1) is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced paintings in the modern literature on colonial South America. The painting has been extensively praised, parsed, and interpreted by twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors, and heralded as the first signed South American portrait. “Remarkable” is the adjective most frequently employed to describe this work: modern authors express surprise and delight not only with the persuasive illusionistic power of the painting, the mesmerizing appearance of its subjects, and the artist's impressive mastery of the genre, but with the fact that the artist chose to sign and date his work, including a specific reference to his Andean identity.

The 1599 portrait Don Francisco de Arobe and His Sons, Pedro and Domingo by Andean artist Andres Sanchez Gallque (Figure 1) is one of the most frequently cited and reproduced paintings in the modern literature on colonial South America. The painting has been extensively praised, parsed, and interpreted by twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors, and heralded as the first signed South American portrait. “Remarkable” is the adjective most frequently employed to describe this work: modern authors express surprise and delight not only with the persuasive illusionistic power of the painting, the mesmerizing appearance of its subjects, and the artist's impressive mastery of the genre, but with the fact that the artist chose to sign and date his work, including a specific reference to his Andean identity.

The iconographical analysis of Four seasons (1993), by the contemporary artist Edwin Parker “Cy” Twombly (Cy Twombly, 1928 – 2011) must be understood considering the importance of one of the most famous impressionist painters: Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841 - 1919). La vague (1879) and Paysage bords de Seine (1879) are two oil on canvas where Renoir prints the feeling of captivating the ephemeral through the colour and the movement of light. Four seasons has its roots in American lyrical abstraction. The need of making a portrait of lightness, through a creation where image and text are together, represents the evolution of Renoir’s work in contemporary art. As an impressionist artist, Renoir describes beauty as the reflection of the harmony of the world, as such as a bridge between aesthetic and emotional education. With this proposal, Cy Twombly sublimates the idea of beauty in contemporary art.

The article focuses on a comprehensive study of Alexander Melamid’s portraiture included in his first independent project after thirty years of collaborative creativity with Vitaly Komar. Throughout the entire thirty-year period of cooperation, the painters signed their works with the Komar and Melamid trademark making it difficult to determine the artists’ individual characters. A detailed analysis of the solo works of the 60-70s, before the beginning of collaborative creativity, is presented; it helps us to detect individual traits in the works of the duet and to better identify the artists’ personalities, to reconstruct the technical features of each artist’s painting style. In 2007, Alexander Melamid began creating a large-scale series of paintings which would become his new conceptual line of creative work; later, in 2009, the artist developed and supplemented the series with portraits of Italian clergy and Russian oligarchs. Characteristic features of the Holy Hip Hop! portrait series, exhibited at the Detroit Museum of Modern Art in 2008, are studied in the article. The artist paid special attention to the psychological characters of the portrayed, the entire series is painted in one color scheme, within one scale. The pictorial series is an integral conceptual statement. The purely plastic qualities of the paintings fade into the background. They are not so important for Alexander Melamid - he uses academic painting as a tool to convey more accurately the psychology of the portrayed whom he treats with ironic interest. It is important to note that Alexander Melamid erases the line between the classical and the marginal art, just as Francois Millet did in his time. The article succeeded in updating sociocultural issues with the help of contextual comparison with portraiture by Diego Velazquez and contemporary American artist Kehinde Wiley whose creative life has deeply integrated into the socio-political realities of the United States of the beginning of the 21st century and the African-American cultural tradition. Kehinde Wiley is known for his realistic large-scale portrayals of African-Americans in poses borrowed from works of classical European painting of the 17-19th centuries. The artist openly propagandizes, deliberately emphasizing the didactic function of his paintings. It is in the context of contemporaries’ works and the political situation in the USA of the 2000-2010s that Alexander Melamid’s work should be considered.

In 1837, two years before the nation began its exuberant love affair with daguerreotype portraits, Nathaniel Hawthorne made a prophetic observation about Americans' problematic obsession with “true” likenesses. In his story, “The Prophetic Pictures,” an unnamed, colonial Boston portrait painter portrayed not merely a man's features, “but his mind and heart.” The painter, as Walter Ludlow tells his fiancée Elinor, “catches the secret sentiments and passions, and throws them upon the canvas, like sunshine – or perhaps, in the portraits of dark-souled men, like a gleam of infernal fire. It is an awful gift.” Other colonists deemed the painter's gift “an offense against the Mosaic law, and even a presumptuous mockery of the Creator,” and still others considered him “a magician, or perhaps the famous Black Man, of old witch times, plotting mischief in a new guise.”

‘It's my PARTY…;’The Cambridge Museum of Classical and General Archaeology opened on 6 May 1884 with – what else? – a PARTY. Distinguished guests turned out, the University meeting the Aristocracy, Arts and Politics: H.R.H. Prince Albert Victor of Wales (the Queen's son, then an undergraduate), Sir Frederick Leighton (President of the Royal Academy), the painters Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Edward Poynter, the American Ambassador, Sir Frederick Burton (Director of the National Gallery), George Scharf (Director of the National Portrait Gallery), and other assorted dignitaries rubbing shoulders and sharing the fun with Richard Jebb (Regius Professor of Greek), E. B. (Primitive Culture) Tylor, S. H. Butcher (of Butcher and Lang's Odyssey), as well as (in the usual formula) ‘the Heads of Colleges, Doctors and Professors, the officers of the University’ … and their ‘ladies’. ‘Luncheon’ was taken in the hall of Gonville and Caius College at one o'clock. A great feast, no doubt, but a bit of a sprint. By two o'clock the assembled company had already finished the pudding and was proceeding to the lecture room of the new museum in Little St Mary's Lane.

Fumie Taniguchi was a nihonga painter whose modern portraits of women enjoyed widespread acclaim within art circles during the 1930s. Although she moved to America shortly after Japan lost the war and spent the latter half of her life there, her existence was suddenly forgotten. There are almost no extant examples of Taniguchi’s paintings from her American period, however, her autobiographical novels that appeared in Japanese American fanzines provide significant clues that help to trace her life. Through these publications and oral interviews with her family members, this article seeks to introduce readers to the painterly practice and life of Taniguchi, and make clear what exactly was distinctive and unique about her life and practice. For a woman who continued to struggle against the patriarchal gaze both in Japan and the Japanese American community, what did the notion of transcending borders mean?

AbstractFor more than a century the only eyewitness account of Rembrandt's Portrait of an old woman (fig. 1) was a description made by Wilhelm Bode in 1883. At the time, he was unable to decipher the date, 1632; nor did he know anything about Aeltje Uylenburgh or the history of the panel. However, the painting's provenance has since been revealed, and it can be traced back in an almost unbroken line to its commission, a rare occurrence in Rembrandt's oeuvre. A pendant portrait, now lost, featured the preacher Johannes Sylvius, who is also the subject of an etching by Rembrandt dating from 1633 (fig. 2). Rembrandt had a close relationship with the Sylvius couple and he married their cousin Saskia Uylenburgh in 1634. After Aeltje's death in 1644, the couple's son Cornelis Sylvius inherited the portraits. We know that Cornelis moved to Haarlem in 1647, and that in 1681 he made a will bequeathing the pendants to his son Johannes Sylvius Junior. For the most part of a century they remained in the family. We lose track of the portrait of Johannes Sylvius when, in 1721, Cornelis II Sylvius refurbishes a house on the Kruisstraat in Haarlem. However, thanks to a handful of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century copies, it has been possible to reconstruct the trail followed by Aeltje. In 1778, a copy from Dessau turned up at auction in Frankfurt. It was bought under the name of Johann Heinrich Roos by Henriette Amalie von Anhalt-Dessau. There is a copy of this copy in the museum of Marseilles, attributed Ferdinand Bol (fig. 3). In 2000 an article in the Tribune de Genève revealed that the original had belonged to the Burlamacchi Collection in the eighteenth century, and was then thought to be a portrait of Rembrandt's mother. Jean-Jacques Burlamacchi (1694-1748), a prominent Geneva collector, acquired major works of art, including probably the Rembrandt portrait, while travelling in Holland and Britain around 1720. It was the heirs of Burlamacchi, the Misses de Chapeaurouge, who opened the famous collection to the public. In 1790 or thereabouts, the Swiss portrait painter Marc-Louis Arlaud produced a copy, now in the museum at Lausanne (fig. 4), which for many years was thought to be an autograph work by Rembrandt. The painter Georges Chaix also made a copy, which he exhibited in Geneva in 1823. This work still belongs to the artist's family; unfortunately it has not been possible to obtain an image. After the Burlamacchi Collection was sold in about 1825, the painting was referred to somewhat nostalgically as 'Un Rembrandt "genevois"'. It was bought for 18,000 francs by the Paris art dealer Dubois, who sold it to the London banker William Coesvelt. In 1828, Coesvelt in turn sold the portrait through the London dealer John Smith, who described it as 'the painter's mother, at the age of 62'. We know that the picture was subsequently acquired from Albertus Brondgeest by the banker James de Rothschild (1792-1868) for his country house at Boulogne, as this is mentioned in the 1864 description of Rothschild's collection by Charles Blanc. Baron James's widow, Betty de Rothschild, inherited the portrait in 1868 and it was in Paris that the Berlin museum director Wilhelm Bode (fig. 5) first saw the painting. In his description of 1883 he states that the woman was not, in his opinion, Rembrandt's mother. In 1886 the portrait fell to Betty's son, Baron Alphonse (1827-1905). Bode published a heliogravure of the work in 1897, which remained for many years the only available reproduction (fig. 6). Rembrandt's portrait of a woman was a showpiece in Baron Alphonse's Paris smoking room (fig. 7). Few art historians came to the Rothschild residence and neither Valentiner nor Bredius, who published catalogues of Rembrandt in 1909 and 1935, respectively, had seen the painting. Alphonse's heir was Baron Edouard de Rothschild, who in 1940 fled to America with his daughter Bethsabée. The Germans looted the painting, but immediately after the war it was exhibited, undamaged, in a frame carrying the (deliberately?) misleading name 'Romney' (fig. 8). In 1949, Bethsabée de Rothschild became the rightful owner of the portrait. She took it with her when she moved to Israel in 1962, where under the name of Bathsheva de Rothschild she became a well-known patron of modern dance. In 1978, J. Bruyn en S. Levie of the Rembrandt Research Project (RRP) travelled to Tel Aviv to examine the painting. Although the surface was covered with a thick nicotine film, they were impressed by its condition. Bruyn and Levie were doubtful, however, that the panel's oval format was original, as emerges from the 'Rembrandt-Corpus' report of 1986. Not having seen the copies mentioned earlier, they were unaware that one nineteenth-century replica was also oval (fig. 9). Their important discovery that the woman's age was 62 was not further investigated at the time. Baroness Bathsheva de Rothschild died childless in 1999. On 13 December 2000 the painting was sold by Christie's, London, after a surprising new identity for the elderly sitter had been put forward. It had long been known that Rembrandt painted portraits of Aeltje Uylenburgh and her husband, the minister Cornelis Sylvius. Aeltje, who was a first cousin of Rembrandt's wife, Saskia Uylenburgh, would have been about 60 years old at the time. Given that the age of the woman in the portrait was now known to be 62, it was suggested that she could be Aeltje. The portrait was acquired for more than 28 million US dollars by the art dealer Robert Noortman, who put it on the market as 'Aeltje' with a question mark. In 2005, Noortman sold the portrait for 36.5 million to the American-Dutch collectors Mr and Mrs De Mol van Otterloo. At the time, the Mauritshuis in The Hague felt that trying to buy the portrait would be too extravagant, while the Rijksmuseum was more interested in acquiring a female portrait from Rembrandt's later period. Aeltje was thus destined to leave the Netherlands for good. A chronicle of the Sylvius family published in 2006 shows that Aeltje Uylenburgh would have been born in 1570 (fig. 10), demonstrating that she could indeed be the 62-year-old woman depicted by Rembrandt in 1632. We know that Aeltje was godmother to Rembrandt's children and that Saskia was godmother to Aeltje's granddaughter. Further evidence of the close ties between the two families is provided by Rembrandt's etching of Aeltje's son Petrus, produced in 1637. It is now generally accepted that the woman in the portrait is Aeltje. She was last shown in the Netherlands at the 'Dutch Portraits' exhibition in The Hague. In February 2008 the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston announced that it had received on long-term loan one the finest Rembrandts still in private ownership.

In recent years, eighteenth-century actors' portraits have deservedly received growing attention from both art and theatre historians. For its extent, variety and quality, for its social and aesthetic implications, eighteenth-century theatrical portraiture demands a refined theoretical approach: it has helped to create an interdisciplinary field where new methods in dealing with theatre iconography have been profitably deployed. English and American scholars have contributed to develop this field in a specific way, devoting single studies and monographs to portraits of actors. In spite of the importance of French theatrical portraiture, French contributions are less significant. In most cases theatrical portraits are considered exclusively by art historians, and in the context of catalogues or monographs on a single painter. In France the stage portrait is often undervalued: it is relegated to a pictorial genre considered as inferior (tableaux de théâtre), or it is thought to derive from a disreputable theatricalization of history painting; in any case there has been a real difficulty in submitting these images to critical and specific investigation. In short, even if a new approach to theatrical iconography prevails over the strict utilitarianism of the theatre historians, who—in the best cases—sought in actors' portraits only documentary evidence of acting practice, costume or set design, more work has to be done by art historians, to accord theatrical images the independent status of an iconographic text.

The Bennington Museum's 2011 exhibition “Grandma Moses and the Primitive Tradition” invited viewers to reassess the twentieth-century work and reception of painter Anna Mary Robertson Moses. The meteoric rise of her art, marketed as “primitive,” coincided with certain refugee German art dealers’ quest to offer an American alternative to the war-contaminated wares of Europe.

Imagine a theater. Build one in your mind. I do not care if it is the largest theater in the universe or if it is the size of a shoebox. The theater can be an elaborate construction with gilded cherubs and priceless jewels. If you would prefer the theater to be a minimal design, imagine it that way. Maybe the theater is made out of glass or crystal. You can be all alone in the theater or maybe you are seated next to an alien, a cave man, or a robot. As the curtain rises an enormous pipe organ is spewing out J.S. Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor. The sound is colossal. The stage is designed to look like a filthy and bleak art studio. Sculptures that look like decaying flesh hang from the ceiling. Papers and dirty painting rags are scattered all over the floor. A roach crawls towards some moldy food in the wastebasket. A piece of beef jerky sits next to a pile of paint tubes and paintbrushes. Canvases are stacked against the wall. Dried paint is splattered everywhere. A woman enters stage left. As she begins to speak, the music fades… “My most recent paintings are meant to serve as gateways between daily life and an exotic utopian fantasy. These strange psychological spaces function as portals into a new frontier inhabited with the most stupendous creatures. Active volcanoes, carnivorous plants, terrible lizards, pink Chihuahuas, flesh-eating insects, unidentified flying objects, and a host of other amazing things coexist in this cruel tropical paradise. “Everything I do is a self-portrait and a disguise. I imagine the characters in my paintings to be mutant clones. The act of painting is like looking in the mirror. I like to spend most of my time doing one or the other. I am driven by an insatiable urge to see what I truly look like. I suffer from an unfulfilled desire to meet myself. I am frustrated with impressions and reflections. These confessions reveal my work as possibly the most disgusting display of narcissism in the entire history of art. “The act of painting is an absurd and self-indulgent enterprise. I paint with the ridiculous and frivolous purpose of delighting the eye. Nevertheless, my hope is that my paintings capture an important aspect of my utopian fantasy with their sumptuous surroundings embellished with rainbows, natural disasters, butterflies, exotic grasses and bizarre costumes. “My paintings can be read on many different levels from surface to deep allegory. The finished product is the result of hours upon hours of painting, pondering, and dreaming. Below the surface lies a nauseating abyss. “My work is a delicious feast for the aesthetic consumer. I am a villainous mad scientist with a hunger for immortality. My eyes are gluttonous fools. I am a mystery and a deception. Vermillion is my opulent fetish. Lemon yellow is my nemesis.” The music grows louder again. The woman begins to cackle. She then takes a deep breath and a deeper and more dramatic bow. She exits stage right--you find that you want to applaud--but unfortunately, this story is not over. I suggest that you get yourself a snack like some popcorn, chocolate, or gummy bears before reading any further. The curtain slowly and elegantly comes down.

In 1800, Gilbert Stuart began three paintings of his friend, republican writer, Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton--the Worcester, Winterthur, and Boston portraits. While Morton has been remembered more for a tragic personal family scandal than for her literary endeavors, Stuart's provocative images acknowledged her as both a poet and an intellect. His portraits presented a progressive and potentially controversial interpretation of his sitter--the lovely and learned Morton--by prioritizing the writer's life of the mind rather than her socially prescribed life in the world. This study reconstructs the circumstances by which Stuart composed the group of Morton paintings that culminate in his unorthodox Worcester rendering through which he ultimately depicted Morton as the first woman of ideas in American art. Supported by close readings of her work, this dissertation illuminates both the course and depth of the exceptional personal and professional relationship between Morton and Stuart. The paths of the two republican figures crossed at several historic junctures and is highlighted by the interconnectivity of their work. Most significantly, the Stuart portraits represent an ideal lens through which to view Morton's life and work as well as to follow the Boston native's transformation into one of America's earliest women of ideas.
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AbstractThis chapter looks at media as decisive in political communication. In focusing on portrayals of American presidents it explores both the set-up of a new template—the ‘statesman-like’ style—and discusses how institutions connect with and shape the populace. Through careful emotion management, curated portrayals of politicians address the population, direct political opinion, promote certain types of leaders, convey moral values, and bolster narratives. Analysing the painted portraits of three American presidents, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Barack Obama, the chapter shows how these images not only depict emotional styles as a sort of code of conduct for the incumbent, but also spur emotions by fostering either support or, conversely, disaffection. Presidential portraits project notions of belonging by making their subjects both relatable and exceptional.

Chapter 2 focuses on mid-century Philadelphia’s burgeoning art community through the figure of travelling English portrait painter John Wollaston, who visited the city in 1752 and 1758/9. Wollaston’s presence encouraged the young student Francis Hopkinson to write a poem about the artist in the new periodical the American Magazine. By tracing the aesthetic responses that Hopkinson and the fellow students in his circle (including Benjamin West) had to Wollaston’s portraits the chapter charts Philadelphians’ engagement with the aesthetic debates raging in London over the role of the artist and the power of the portrait to civilize. Hopkinson embraced the new model of connoisseurship being popularized in the British art capital of London but recast it to argue that the portrait could civilize the sitter. Reading Wollaston’s portraits through the model of physiognomy reveals how viewers understood his paintings to improve sitters’ civility and how his paintings forged social connections between sitters.

Mihri Rasim was an Ottoman-Turkish portrait painter and educator. Born in 1885 in Istanbul under the Ottoman Empire, she came from the Ottoman imperial elite. Rasim led an avant-garde life and was a feminist pioneer. In 1914 Rasim used her connections with the leaders of the Young Turk movement to found the first Ottoman-Turkish school of fine art for women (Inas Sanayi-i Nefise Mektebi). As head of the women’s academy she introduced life classes that used nude female models. Rasim was part of an exclusive circle gathered around the progressive journal Servet-i Fünun [The Merit of the Sciences]. A cosmopolitan artist, between 1907 and 1927 Rasim lived from time to time in European cities, where she worked with celebrated international artists including the American John Singer Sargent, the Frenchman Léon Bonnat, and the Austrian Rudolf Bacher. She portrayed era-defining men as well as controversial ones, e.g. Benito Mussolini, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Paul von Hindenburg, Georges Bernard Shaw, and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. In 1927 Rasim immigrated to the United States and continued to move in politically and culturally elite circles. Rasim painted the portraits of great American men, leaders in science, industry, and government, including Thomas Edison, Edwin Markham, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Utilizing National Congregations Study data, this chapter paints a demographic portrait of American Catholic parishes in which Latinos are underrepresented and the affluent overrepresented, compared to the overall self-identified Catholic population. As the United States grows increasingly diverse racially, and as the gap between the rich and the poor grows, American Catholic parishes are also highly segregated economically and ethnically. Indeed, Latinos and the wealthy are significantly more segregated by parish than they are by neighborhood. With ethnic and economic segregation closely tied, the Catholic parish landscape is increasingly composed of rich white parishes and poor Latino parishes. The chapter grapples with implications of this empirical reality, along with potential solutions.

This chapter studies a series of portraits of young women dressed for the masquerade, completed by English artist John Wollaston in Charleston, South Carolina. Although Wollaston painted the sitters in historic costume appropriate for a public masked ball, no masquerades were held in the British North American colonies. Instead, these fictional portrayals allowed colonial women to vicariously participate in the sexually riotous assemblies. For male colonists, the paintings underlined the need to contain women’s sexuality. In a colonial environment, many feared women’s proximity to native Americans would spur savage behaviors and compromise civil society. Most of the portraits feature young women about to be married, connecting their masked visages with the metaphor of a woman in courtship who masked her affections to attain the best husband. Wollaston’s adoption of mask iconography also resonates with the tumultuous 1760s, marked by the growing political crisis between Great Britain and her American colonies, when colonists questioned the nature of their identity as imperial subjects and feared British duplicity.

This chapter begins by examining Gilbert’s classmates at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, in 1890–1891—Carleton Brownson, Andrew Fossum, John Pickard—and their professor, Annual Director Rufus Richardson of Dartmouth College. It then proceeds to examine Gilbert’s living accommodations at the American School’s new building on the eastern outskirts of Athens. From there, it paints a portrait of the city of Athens in 1890, highlighting the contrasts between old and new in the rapidly growing city. The chapter introduces Greek minister Michael Demetrius Kalopothakes and his Canadian-born wife Margaret who welcomed Gilbert and other Americans to their church and home in central Athens. It also introduces US consul Irving Manatt, a classical scholar who was an avid booster of the American School. Through the lenses of the Kalopothakes family and Manatt, the reader learns more about the politics, culture, and society of Greece in 1890 and gains a better understanding of how Gilbert experienced Greece.

The primary focus of this chapter is the fixed-form mask in its many manifestations, beginning with ‘Death Masks Re-membered’. The difference between performance masks and death masks is theorised, including a discussion of photographs of the death masks of notable figures. The fascination of modernist painters with African masks in British, French and German museums is discussed with reference to the Picasso Primitif exhibition (2017) and to the history of anthropological exhibitions of the ‘savage’ during the early years of Modernism. Indigenous masquerade is further explored by commentary on photographic portraits of the ‘other’, with consideration of the rapport between subject and photographer. Painted images of the mask object and disguised individuals by Paul Cézanne, James Ensor, Émil Nolde and Pablo Picasso are contrasted with Edward Sheriff Curtis’s photos of Native American masking. Modernist innovations in masquerade, like the dance scenography of Loïe Fuller, highlight alternative methods of changing the body image, as well as transforming the human figure into a part-object form (an aspect exhibited also in a painting by Margaret Macdonald Mackinstosh). Modernist Pierrots in Berlin, Copenhagen and St Petersburg, for example, suggest that playful disguise was an almost-universal impulse in Modernism across Europe and the United Kingdom.

As Americans created a new political republic in the years after the Revolution, they questioned whether women could be trusted to bear republican responsibilities or whether they were too duplicitous. A set of elaborate dressing tables and dressing chests produced for elite women’s use in New York City and Charleston, South Carolina, in the 1790s implicate elite women’s toilette rituals in debates over authenticity and deception. As women applied cosmetics before their mirrors they improved their faces and enhanced their civility, drawing comparison to portrait painters who similarly altered public personas. Women enjoyed a unique relationship with their dressing furniture, and pieces became a kind of body double for elite users, even being dressed in similar costume. Dressing tables and chests deceived viewers by hiding cosmetics inside concealed drawers and allowing women to keep secret their use of makeup. Even as dressing furniture anchored women’s attempts to move into new roles in the republic, it compromised their characters through fears of social counterfeit.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of scientific findings on correlations between each of the Big Five dimensions and creativity. The author notes that we can’t know everything about artist personality or the intricacies of artistic process, but that does not mean we can’t know anything. The research has been done, and the job, now, is to sift through it, identify what’s known, and craft a general portrait. A generic artist personality profile is outlined. The author presents a contrast between the average scientist and the average artist. From there, the author focuses on the trait-based roots of creativity, including detailed discussion of the exact Big Five profiles of two accomplished creatives: Kuwaiti painter Shurooq Amin and American writer Walter Kirn.

Elite colonists in the port cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston sought to construct a new civil society on the margins of the British Empire. They turned to material artifacts as a means of building networks between people. Through purchase of common goods and similar modes of object use, colonial consumers formulated communities of taste that drew individuals together. Colonists relied upon the power of assemblage to transform their individual identities and to create a sensus communis. The portraits painted by Joseph Blackburn in Bermuda and New England illuminate the regional divergences in transatlantic polite culture and point to the local bonds forged through artifacts and objects’ power to assemble the social.