Existing comment:
The American Revolution was not just a political event, but a revolution in consciousness as the colonists created a distinctive sense of their difference and growing distance from England, and even continental Europe. Quietly, and then suddenly, as thought turned to action in the 1770s, America was forging a unique identity. The protean figure in this process of cultural definition was Benjamin Franklin, the original American self-made man, the one individual who embodied in his own biography the restless, striving character of the Revolutionary generation. His example was followed by others. When the aspiring portrait painter Charles Willson Peale returned from training as an artist in London, he recognized that the themes of European history were unsuited to his native land. Instead, he painted the men and women who were making America. In his painting of farmer and agricultural reformer John Dickinson, he deliberately added an American landscape, showing how character and purpose were derived from the settlement of this continent. Peale would go on to paint the scientists, intellectuals, and political figures who were defining what it meant to be an American. |