Kinship and commerce: James Earl and the business of portraiture in the Atlantic world, 1785-1796
Date
2017
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Obscured by a lack of information and over a century of misattribution, the work of American portraitist James Earl (1761-1796) has largely escaped scholarly interest. Despite Earl’s oeuvre of illustrious patrons in London, Providence, Rhode Island and Charleston, South Carolina, attention has centered on the New England portraits of his older brother, Ralph Earl, the more prolific and longer-lived of the two artists. ☐ This thesis first serves to clarify Earl’s biography, tracing his career in Britain and America, as well as to bringing to light newly discovered evidence of his training under Ralph Earl. It then examines his subsequent American work through the lens of two double portraits by Earl of nearly identical composition, revealing an understudied network of commercial and cultural exchange between Providence and Charleston in the 1790s, on the eve of the American textile revolution. Through these paintings, I explore how Earl was situated at the crux of an increasingly connected Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century, and how his portraits functioned within the complicated kinship, commercial and social networks it produced.
Description
Keywords
Social sciences, Communication and the arts, Charleston, Early Republic, James Earl, Portraiture, Providence, Transatlantic