| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America. By Margaretta M. Lovell. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. x, 341 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8122-3842-7.)
Margaretta M. Lovell has been writing creative essays on eighteenth-century American portraiture and material culture for nearly two decades. Art in a Season of Revolution is a compendium of the most important of these, revised and updated, plus two previously unpublished essays. Her work has been of interest to historians, as well as art historians, for her goal is "to look at objects and images to understand culture, not to look at cultural background to better understand singular objects" (p. 3). By focusing on the agency of the objects she studies, Lovell has challenged both fields.	1
Excepting one chapter, which is concerned with cabinetmaking in Newport, Rhode Island, the essays concentrate on portraits created in New England, focusing on the work of John Singleton Copley and John Smibert. Rather than documenting the careers of early American artists, Lovell uses a tight focus on one painting, or a group of paintings or objects, not only "to see the individual object event but also to see it staged and restaged within both local and vast interdependent social networks" (p. 270).	. . .

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