Existing comment:
Colonial & Revolutionary Eras
Situated in one of the nation's original thirteen colonies, VMFA's American art collection traces more than three hundred years of cultural exchange and development. From the time of North America's first permanent English colony -- in Jamestown, Virginia -- enterprising portrait painters, artisans, and consumers participated in a dynamic material culture that played a significant role in shaping family and social life. Closely following fashions in Europe (particularly England, France, Germany, and Holland), talented craftsmen from South, Mid-Atlantic, and New England applied established techniques and styles to native materials, merging tradition and invention.
Portraiture, a genre informed by patterns of population growth and widespread assumptions about class and gender, flourished alongside individual prosperity. By having their likenesses captured in oil, wealthy residents of Charleston, Williamsburg, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston -- British America's leading cultural centers -- affirmed their social status in the emerging nation. Emulating European aristocracy, colonial patrons also encouraged painters to explore so-called Grand Manner themes of heroism and nobility in an emerging neoclassical style inspired by Greco-Roman art. |