| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

William Dunlap and the Construction of an American Art History. By Maura Lyons. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. xiv, 182 pp. $34.95, ISBN 1-55849-475-8.)

Any scholar researching the visual arts in the United States before 1834 must reckon with William Dunlap (1766–1839) and his elephantine History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834). The book throbs with gossipy anecdotes about hundreds of artists. Dunlap was a painter, novelist, playwright, and theater historian who strove to be a player in defining American culture. The scholar must beware, however, for Dunlap is never impartial. In her William Dunlap and the Construction of an American Art History, Maura Lyons reminds us that every text has an agenda. Dunlap's agenda in publishing the first history of American art was to place himself at the hub of that history as cultural arbiter.

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