Londoners found much to marvel at in the Royal Academy of Art’s 1780 exhibition. The first annual exhibition held in the academy’s imposing new home in Somerset House, it showcased nearly five hundred pieces of art. The paintings, always the stars of the show, were in a grand exhibition room. There, bookended by enormous new portraits of King George III and Queen Charlotte, paintings were hung nearly floor to ceiling on the thirty-two-foot-high walls. Landscape paintings and portraits of nobles jostled for attention alongside historical paintings and imagined scenes from Shakespeare’s plays.
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To make sense of the crowded display, catalogs were given with admission that assigned each painting a number and detailed its artist and title. Number 202 in the catalog was the work of twenty-two-year-old Joseph Wright, a promising, award-winning Royal Academy student notable for being one of the first Americans to study there. Number 202, Mrs. Wright Modelling a Head in Wax, was his debut entry into the annual exhibition. “Mrs. Wright” was his mother, Patience Wright, the celebrated American wax sculptor who ran a popular London wax museum. She also was a notoriously passionate supporter of the American cause for independence from Britain, now in its fifth year of armed conflict. So passionate, in fact, that she was rumored (correctly) to be a spy.
If that weren’t controversial enough, this was more than simply a portrait of her at work. Busts of King George and Queen Charlotte watched her work, and what she modeled was the decapitated head of King Charles I. It was, as everyone who saw it knew, a portrait of regicide.
Joseph Wright’s painting was just one of many portraits in the show, but it was one of the most widely remarked upon pieces that year. As one observer put it: “By what lethargy of liberty it happened I do not know,” but the undeniable truth remained that there was “a picture of Mrs. Wright modelling the head” of England’s king famously executed by his own subjects for anyone to see, with “their Majesties contemplating it.” If Wright hoped for fame with this first exhibition, he achieved his goal. His portrait of his mother caused quite a stir. Patience Wright’s fame was already widespread. Her likeness circulated in popular London magazines and prints, making her image known as well as her name.
And here on the walls of the Royal Academy for anyone willing to pay two shillings to see was this easily identified woman, as famous for her pro-American politics as her wax creations, symbolically enacting violence against one monarch while threatening another. The portrait’s political implications were obvious. Displayed where it was—in a space that celebrated royal largesse—it created a sensation.
Art too could be a weapon, and a powerful one at that in a war where public opinion mattered, as it assuredly did in the American Revolution.
But reactions to the portrait varied widely. It was railed against as an insult to decency, even treasonous by some. Others saluted it, hailing it as an entertaining and instructive defense of constitutional liberties. The clashing opinions and its remarkable presence at London’s Royal Academy remind us that the war we now call the American Revolution was fought on both sides of the Atlantic by artists as well as soldiers, and in the courts of public opinion as well as on the battlefield. The same week the public (including, notably, the king and queen themselves) first saw Wright’s incendiary portrait on the walls of London’s Royal Academy, the vastly outnumbered American forces in Charleston, South Carolina, were in the final days of a futile attempt to hold off a British siege.
Soon they would surrender in what was the American forces’ single largest defeat of the war. Although they fought using different weapons, both those soldiers in Charleston and the artist Joseph Wright were united in their support for the American cause. Both fired shots for liberty in the spring of 1780. Art too could be a weapon, and a powerful one at that in a war where public opinion mattered, as it assuredly did in the American Revolution.
But art, like many things, does not always survive the havoc of history. What is preserved in our museums is only a very small bit of what was once created and seen. Wright’s portrait of his mother, for example, survives only in archival documentation like letters and newspapers. The portrait itself must be imagined, for it cannot be seen. Although its certain fate is unknown, it likely was lost in a shipwreck.
In 1781, Joseph Wright left London for Paris, where the Franco-American alliance had created a craze for all things American. Once American victory over Britain was all but certain, Wright took advantage of the promise of peace and made plans to return to the United States. He thought the new nation offered even more possibilities for an ambitious young artist to make his mark, turn a profit, and capture history. His materials and European-made portraits in hand, Joseph Wright left France in fall 1782, sailing on a Boston-bound ship called the Argo. Unlike its mythological namesake, this American-owned Argo did not complete its quest.
After a ten-week journey, battling gusts of snow-filled wind on its last day at sea, the Argo approached the Maine coast and ran aground on a pile of rocks. Although the passengers managed to swim or be hauled on ropes to shore, much of the ship’s cargo—which included tea, brandy, nails, iron, and Wright’s paintings—was lost, washed out of the ship’s hold and either plundered by a passing privateer and people living nearby or sunk below the waves.
Joseph Wright’s portrait of his mother holding the decapitated head of Charles I may have sunk under the Atlantic near the coast of Maine. But even though it is physically lost, it still offers an invaluable window into the revolutionary past. Much as we can dive to retrieve shipwrecked things from the bottom of the sea, we can write histories that allow us to see previously submerged stories about the past. Just because they are submerged or hidden does not mean that they are not there. Bringing up these revolutionary portraits from the depths of the past and into the light, we can see a new transatlantic history of the American Revolution and the creative people who made it, one that transforms the way we think of the nature of patriotism—then and now.
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The infamous portrait of his mother holding the decapitated head of King Charles I was not the only painting Joseph Wright likely lost at sea. He also lost at least one of his portraits of a widely popular man of international fame, one whose many images made his face “as well known as that of the moon” on both sides of the Atlantic. This man was Benjamin Franklin. When Wright was in Paris, Franklin took time out of his diplomatic duties to let Wright paint his portrait. Franklin allowed Wright enough of his time, in fact, that the young artist feared “he must be tired of seeing me so constantly.” One of the reasons Franklin showed kindness to Wright was that Wright’s mother was one of the American diplomat’s longtime friends, if often an exasperating and sometimes an embarrassing one.
What made Patience Wright and Franklin friends initially was a bond over their prewar celebrity as American geniuses who took London by storm. What kept them friends, despite the strains American rebellion and revolution sometimes placed on their friendship, was a shared devotion to American independence and the larger cause of liberty, an ardent patriotism they practiced first in London and then in Paris. Franklin, Patience Wright, and her son Joseph all shared a bond forged from their common identity as transatlantic Patriots.
But these three played roles in a whole cast of noteworthy Patriots who learned radical ideas, practiced rebellion, and fought for the young republic in the heart of two monarchies, first in London and then in Paris, as well as across the Atlantic in North America. Artists, spies, soldiers, intellectuals, and prisoners of war, these Patriots fired salvos against the king on the walls of the Royal Academy as well as on the battlefields of Virginia and Massachusetts. Some of them, like Franklin, were influential white men. But more often, and ironically at times to their advantage, they were excluded from formal sites of power, from legislatures and military headquarters. The women and the Black and mixed-race people at the center of this book used their creative fire to shape ideas and events. They practiced idiosyncratic politics, sometimes by necessity as well as choice. They declared their independence with paint, canvas, wax, and wit as well as muskets and pamphlets. Together, these transatlantic Patriots’ stories bring to life the reality that American patriotism in the revolutionary era was far more cosmopolitan and expansive than many still assume it to be today. The full story of American patriotism is only visible through a transatlantic lens.
Although we are now used to thinking that Loyalists—the Americans who opposed independence—continued to nurture bonds with people and politicians across the ocean, we are not as accustomed to thinking of Patriots and their supporters in the same way. Yet Loyalists were not the only historical actors to foster transatlantic attachments. Pro-American sentiment in Britain was felt in all walks of life. And although it was strongest in London, it was never limited to that city alone. Support for the American cause could be found among celebrities, artists, aristocrats, wealthy merchants, and men and women of ordinary means.
When Thomas Paine published Common Sense, the runaway bestseller of 1776 that galvanized American independence, he was a recent, impoverished British immigrant to North America who learned his radical political ideas in England. Commercial and cultural ties between the mother country and its colonies, among other factors, provided material and intellectual support for the American cause in Britain. Some of the most ardent pro-American Britons were radical Whig politicians and thinkers. Although not all Whigs supported independence by any means, their voices and symbols inspired and sustained American Patriots who did, both those in North America and those who lived thousands of miles away but were dedicated to supporting the American cause nonetheless. Americans recognized these transatlantic connections.
When George Washington, newly appointed commander of the Continental army, chose the colors of buff and blue for his uniform, he did so as a nod to the fact that women and men in Britain wore these same colors to announce their Whig politics. But despite these ties, unless they committed crimes against the state outright, British supporters of the American cause in places like London or Bath rarely risked as much as their American-born counterparts did. British-born artists, for example, might face a loss of patronage and income for creating pro-American art, but they were unlikely to land in the Tower. However, especially after Parliament passed the Treason Act of 1777—an act allowing the government to detain rebels accused of committing crimes in the newly declared United States of America or on the high seas—American Patriots in Britain were viewed with suspicion.
American civilians—including South Carolina politician Henry Laurens (captured on the Atlantic) and Patience Wright’s future son-in-law Ebenezer Smith Platt (arrested for treasonous crimes at sea)—were accused of treason under the act and brought to British prisons, even the famed Tower of London. Americans living in Britain, including artist and former Continental army officer John Trumbull, were also arrested and imprisoned. In Trumbull’s case, he was arrested under a charge of espionage. The charge was not an indictment of his art but rather a retaliatory measure, a punishment for Washington’s recent execution of British spy and media darling Major John André.
In addition to these celebrity cases, hundreds more anonymous American military men spent the war languishing in notoriously bad British prisons, starved of the basic niceties international standards dictated for prisoners of war—a status they were denied as rebel combatants. If you were born in America or a recent resident of the rebellious colonies, it was potentially very dangerous indeed to be an American Patriot living across the Atlantic Ocean or even sailing upon it during the war.
But this book is more than a transatlantic history of American patriotism, a tale of entangled political loyalties and dramatic, colorful personal lives. It is also a history of the cultural underpinnings of revolution, asking how artists and their networks of families, patrons, and supporters produced revolutionary political culture and created visual and material representations of patriotism. Revolutionary eras are unpredictable, destabilizing times. As such, they allow—demand, even—innovation, invention, and reinvention. They require the work of creative people. In the unstable era of the American Revolution, the future was unclear. Creative people of all kinds had the space and the skills to create and recreate new political cultures. This book considers the history of just such creative people, people whose lives have been too often considered on the margins of politics when in fact they were central to the making of revolution.
The idea that artists document protest and help make revolution is not a novel one. Some of the artists whose images first drove and then commemorated the American Revolution—notably, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, and even the cautiously neutral John Singleton Copley—have been studied again and again. It is their art that hangs on the walls of museums; it is their lives studied in numerous biographies. Whether displayed larger than life in the Capitol Rotunda or shrunk to fit on the back of paper currency, the images these men created are everywhere. They continue to shape popular ideas about what the American Revolution looked like and who its heroes were, just as they have done for generations since that conflict began.
But the art—and lives—of these well-known men are not the whole story. In fact, the images and history they created obscure a far more radical and esoteric patriotism practiced by other artists in the same moment. Their decorous representations of the war and republic are reassuring, especially to modern eyes, in their romanticized heroism. By contrast, the artist Patriots in this book often crafted a form of patriotism that faced up to the injustice of slavery and the challenges of patriarchal society. It was patriotism with a different grammar, a different look—one that would have seemed both risky and idiosyncratic at the time. A portrait of a decapitated king and a wax museum filled with lifelike, life-sized political icons offered a different visual effect and material experience and inspired different emotions than viewing a neoclassical history painting in a gilded frame. Patriotism, like revolution and even creativity itself, is not always comforting or familiar.
This was especially true for the transatlantic Patriots in this book, including enslaved people who had to hide their politics from their Loyalist enslavers, women who had to make a living in a patriarchal world, and American Patriots living in enemy territory. In centering their experience, this transatlantic story reveals the political importance of both creative women as well as men, and Black and mixed-race people as well as white. It explores how they deployed their creative powers, through slavery and freedom, through rebellion and revolution, from war and into peace.
Included in their number are the three Patriot artists whose intertwined lives and families are at the heart of this history: Patience Wright (1725-1786), Prince Demah (c. 1745-1778), and Robert Edge Pine (c. 1726-1788). These three form a natural transatlantic network from their shared overlapping professional, social, ideological, and political connections. They also form a historically (and historiographically) valuable network. This network encompasses broader contributions made by the diverse artists, including women, Black and mixed-race people, and immigrants, who shaped patriotic rebellion, American revolution, and national political culture.
A testament to the extraordinary lives of these Patriots is that they, like many of their more famous contemporaries, had remarkable achievements while fighting for the American cause. Benjamin Franklin, of course, was the Revolution’s most famous American intellectual figure living abroad. And his long career as an American based first in London and then in Paris perfectly captures the importance of the transatlantic to these Patriots’ stories. But although extraordinary, he was not singular, either in his transatlantic patriotism or his celebrated genius. This book is the first to consider Demah, Pine, and Wright and their families—alongside the larger cast of historical characters with whom their lives intersected—as an interconnected network that has much to tell us about the American Revolution and Founding Era.
Like Franklin, Wright was famous (or, depending on the taste of the observer, infamous) in her own time. First as a trailblazing, American-born wax sculptor whose clients included members of the British aristocracy and royal family, and then as a London-based spy for the American cause, she earned fame on both sides of the Atlantic. Exceptional herself, she was also the matriarch of a remarkable family. Her son Joseph was noteworthy for being one of the first American-born students to study at London’s Royal Academy of Art and, later, for being the first artist appointed to design currency for the newly established US Mint.
Her oldest daughter Elizabeth, likewise, gained contemporary fame for her artistry as she followed in her mother’s footsteps as a sculptor who operated popular wax museums in the young United States. Elizabeth also caught the public eye for her marriage to Ebenezer Smith Platt, the somewhat unsavory New Yorker who became a slave trader in Georgia. Elizabeth’s husband gained fame as one of the first victims of Britain’s 1777 Treason Act and international sympathy for his long imprisonment in shackles, first on the high seas and then in London. Elizabeth’s younger sister Phoebe, a noted beauty who modeled for high-profile artists in London, including Royal Painter Benjamin West, also caught the attention of the public and King George III himself by her marriage. She wed John Hoppner, a dashing young Royal Academy-trained painter rumored to be the illegitimate son of the king.
In London, the American Wrights shared social and professional networks with the British family of artist Robert Edge Pine, who painted the only portrait of Patience Wright known to survive. Pine, an award-winning painter, was the son of John Pine, a successful English engraver who held royal appointments under King George II and counted famed painter William Hogarth among his close friends. Robert Edge Pine was also an English man who considered himself an American Patriot. Like a significant number of other Britons, including two of his famous portrait clients—radical Whig politician John Wilkes and famed woman historian Catharine Sawbridge Macaulay—he saw a clear throughline from the English republicanism that flourished in the aftermath of the execution of King Charles I in the English Civil War to the American Patriot cause. He was so inspired by the American fight for liberty that he used his art to criticize Britain during the war while living in England.
After the war, he—along with his wife and daughters, most of whom were artists, too—immigrated to the United States to chronicle the great moments of the revolution in paint. His father had enjoyed the patronage of the British king; he enjoyed the patronage of George and Martha Washington, who were delighted to commission work from this “artist of taste and eminence.” When Pine chose to immigrate to the United States after the war, the Washingtons welcomed him because they knew his art could help shape the new nation’s political culture and how not just Americans but the world remembered the war they preferred to call a revolution. What they did not know was that Pine was likely of African descent.
Pine’s mixed race might have influenced his choice of one of the pupils he agreed to train in London in the early 1770s, a former mariner from Britain’s North American colonies known at the time as Prince Demah Barnes. Prince Demah, as he preferred to call himself, was the first identifiable enslaved portrait painter in America, born in Massachusetts to Daphny, a woman born in Africa and sold into slavery across the Atlantic. With the encouragement of his colonial enslavers, merchant Henry Barnes and his wife, Christian, a would-be art patron, Prince Demah traveled to London in 1771 to hone his painterly craft. After studying under Pine, he returned to Massachusetts and set up shop as a professional painter of portraits. Once crisis became war, Prince Demah gained his freedom when his Loyalist enslavers fled North America. Prince Demah did not share his enslavers’ politics, a fact he made clear when he enlisted to fight for the Patriots.
Like liberty, patriotism required a fire to sustain it. But fire needs fuel, and this is what the revolutionary creatives provided.
One of his neighbors in Boston made a similar political choice when she too gained her freedom. That was the poet Phillis Wheatley. In 1773, Wheatley also traveled to London with her enslaver to further her artistic career. While in London, Wheatley met many of the same people who knew Patience Wright—many of them people whose wax portraits Wright had in her popular Pall Mall museum. Like Wright, Wheatley’s artistic work found support among members of the British aristocracy. And like Wright, she was introduced to Benjamin Franklin (although their initial meeting was less warm than his first meeting with Wright). Like Demah, Wheatley returned to Massachusetts after her stay in London. Along with Benjamin Franklin, she was an integral part of the network of transatlantic Patriots who created revolutionary political culture as they moved around the Atlantic World. Like Franklin, Wheatley is one of the familiar figures who many of the unknown Founders at the heart of this transatlantic tale knew well.
Each of these figures, in turn, opens up broader histories on both sides of the Atlantic. Through them, we will see glimpses of many other revolutionary lives. Through Demah and Wheatley, we see the world of enslaved artists and Black artisans in London as well as in Boston. We see the experience of enslaved people in wealthy Loyalist families, and their careful efforts to keep their politics to themselves and their loved ones safe before seizing their own freedom. We will see the bustle of artistic patronage and training in St. Martin’s Lane—the hum of creative production in a community of artists and artisans, both women and men. We will see the networks of personal and professional connections among artists of all kinds—sculptors, painters, poets, pamphleteers, and more—and how critical their imaginative work was to making the American Revolution.
These people’s histories range from the eccentric to the inspiring and are often stranger than fiction, memorable as well as consequential. Yet, with the exception of Franklin and Wheatley, they have been mostly dropped from our collective memory about the revolution and founding era. In the case of the three artists whose intertwined lives and families are at the center of this book, this is in part because so much of their art is lost. Although the portraits Joseph Wright lost in that shipwreck off the coast of Maine provide a particularly dramatic tale, the loss or destruction of revolutionary-era art was in fact quite common. Most of Patience Wright’s wax figures burned in fires.
A handful of wax profiles attributed to her survive, but only one of the life-sized wax statues that made her famous survives today: her portrait of a British politician admired by colonial Americans, William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Like Wright’s, some of Robert Edge Pine’s work went up in flames (much of it, in an odd twist of fate, in the very same nineteenth-century museum fire that destroyed many of Wright’s wax sculptures). The whereabouts of most of the portraits painted by Demah, meanwhile, remains a mystery. Some may be tucked away in New England attics, some may be lost to fires, and still others may be displayed in homes or museums as the work of an “unknown artist.” What is seen in museums today does not always give a full reflection of the images, objects, and ideas that widely circulated and influenced public discourse in the past.
Still, Demah, Pine, and Wright are hidden in plain sight. Although their surviving body of work is slim, it is on display in places millions of people visit each year on both sides of the Atlantic. A portrait by Prince Demah hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Edge Pine’s paintings are on display at Mount Vernon and in the National Portrait Galleries in both London and Washington, DC, and Wright’s statue of Pitt stands in Westminster Abbey. Their fame is eclipsed by more familiar white male artists like Peale, Copley, and Trumbull, whose works live on in many museums on both sides of the Atlantic, just as their lives are obscured by the long shadow cast by famous white Patriot figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. Bringing these three artists’ stories into the light gives a truer picture of revolutionary art and who made it, as well as a more accurately inclusive, and thus more vibrant and exciting, image of Patriots themselves. Each of these three artists helped create the visual world of the revolutionary era. Moreover, their patriotic contributions also extended far beyond molding wax and wielding paintbrushes. Demah was not just a portrait painter but a soldier. Wright was not just a wax sculptor but an advocate for prisoners of war and a Patriot spy. And Pine was not just a painter but a founder of popular museum culture in the early American republic.
Looking at the revolution through a transatlantic geography reminds us that the American Revolution was fought on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the depth of support for the rebellion, and reasons for that support, shifted at various points in time, at no point was the “American war” universally popular in Britain, just as, it should be remembered, the revolution was never universally popular in America. The establishment of an independent United States of America was never inevitable. The complexity of this picture, the uncertainty of the support, the ambiguity of the outcome, all are reminders that people had to be persuaded (often, more than once) to believe in the cause of liberty and to light its spark. And like liberty, patriotism required a fire to sustain it. But fire needs fuel, and this is what the revolutionary creatives provided.
As Phillis Wheatley wrote in her poem, “To S.M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works,” “the painter’s and the poet’s fire” burns within creative souls, no matter their status or situation. During the revolutionary era, a network of diverse people on both sides of the Atlantic used their own creative fire to help ignite and spread the flame of liberty that blazed around the Atlantic. The linking of unfamiliar Founders like Demah, Wright, and Pine through this transatlantic creative network to now better-known Founders, such as Franklin and Wheatley, helped to forge an Atlantic Revolution among Patriots, no less than among Loyalists. This book tells their stories.
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Excerpted from The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution by Zara Anishanslin. Copyright © 2025. Available from Harvard University Press.
