Composing the Revolution Across the Atlantic
The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution by Zara Anishanslin (Harvard University Press, 2025)
Reviewed by Matthew J. Sparacio
Who was a patriot in the 1700s? What did they look like?
This is the question that anchors Zara Anishanslin’s new work The Painter’s Fire. When I teach about the American Revolution and the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I typically show students John Trumbull’s 1818 painting now located in the U.S. Capitol rotunda. I’ve always found it a helpful teaching resource. It draws attention to the committee work that went into drafting and debating the Declaration. It also shows a completely fabricated scene, a composite painting that includes everyone, even though members of the Second Continental Congress were constantly traveling in and out of Philadelphia. If there is anything accurate about the painting, it is the forty-seven white men shown in Trumbull’s rendition who capture the segment of colonial society that ultimately took the decisive step to break with Great Britain. Though not about that painting, this book is about “three artists in pursuit of liberty.”
In The Painter’s Fire, Anishanslin argues that members of the patriot movement could and did look very different from the men in Trumbull’s painting. On the surface, this claim is not new. Historians have long studied the “bottom-up” roots of colonial protest and resistance, most clearly articulated in Gary Nash’s classic The Urban Crucible (Harvard University Press, 1979). Similarly, Timothy Breen charted the way unremarkably common colonists leveraged the marketplace and established networks of surveillance and coercion to express their political discontent in American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (Hill & Wang, 2010). These works (and others) complicate the widely popular and oft-repeated Neo-Whig interpretations of the Revolution that can be traced back to Edmund Morgan’s massively influential Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). Morgan argued that colonists inherited a virulent distrust of consolidated power and threats to liberty that dated back to the English Civil War. For the influential Bernard Bailyn, it was Enlightenment ideas, not economic interests, that accelerated the Revolution.
What is unique about Anishanslin’s scholarship in The Painter’s Fire is her transatlantic focus. She centers her narrative on Patience Wright, Prince Demah, or Robert Edge Pine, a group of what she calls “transatlantic patriots.” In doing so, she adds a rich contribution to our understanding of the connections of patriot networks and complicates the notion that patriotism was an ideology isolated in the colonies. These transatlantic patriots are not the disgruntled dock workers in The Urban Crucible or the Enlightened elites of Bailyn, but instead part of a “cosmopolitan and expansive” movement unbound by the Atlantic (5). Hers is also the first work in a long time that seriously situates the American Revolution and War for Independence on both sides of the Atlantic. Even recent studies of Loyalists tend to have developments in Great Britain as background noise. In The Painter’s Fire, however, patriots are living in British townhouses, walking on British streets, entertaining in British social circles, and – at least in the case of wax sculptor Patience Wright – having several private audiences with George III. (Even Benjamin Franklin lived in London 1757-1775.) This was a tangible, proximate, and real kind of power and influence that Wright leveraged as a spy for the Americans. Her sway in England proved far more impressive than any that the leading Sons of Liberty like Samuel Adams could ever hope to claim. Yet hers was a power that generations of historians have ignored because Wright was both a woman and an artisan.
By focusing on “forgotten artists,” Anishanslin expands the scope of patriotism past the familiar cast of characters to include women and people of color, all of whom used their “creative fire” to advocate for American freedom. Except for Benjamin Franklin, you will not find the subjects of Anishanslin’s book in Trumbull’s painting. This is a refreshing perspective. Most Americans know who Benjamin Franklin is, whether because of his experiments with electricity or his advice to hustle in “The Way to Wealth.” Some Americans (but probably not enough) may also be familiar with Phillis Wheatley's poetry. But most have never heard of Patience Wright, Prince Demah, or Robert Edge Pine. It is precisely due to this historical amnesia that we need The Painter’s Fire. Knowing these individuals’ stories helps us better understand the base that the patriot movement drew support and inspiration from.
The lives of these transatlantic patriots and artists intersected with the standard narrative of the imperial crisis in several unexpected ways. Copies of Phillis Wheatley’s first book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral – which she had to travel to London to secure funding to publish – were delayed in getting delivered to America because they were shipped on the Dartmouth with 342 chests of tea that wound up in Boston Harbor. Prince Demah met the same fate as 130,000 other victims when he succumbed to smallpox in 1778, despite George Washington’s orders the previous year from Morristown that soldiers in the Continental Army be inoculated. Robert Edge Pine, born in Britain but a stalwart advocate for American liberty during the war, eventually relocated to the United States after independence, where he painted portraits of the founding generation extolling their collective “heroic virtue” (254). Along with his own version of Congress Voting Independence, Pine’s prolific output (over ninety works!) included portraits of the likes of George Washington and, yes, Patience Wright.
Another implied but nonetheless important contribution Anishanslin makes is the way she uses the experiences of Pine, Demah, and Wheatley to muddy what has become an oversimplified dichotomy in explaining the Black experience during the American Revolution. In part driven by both the scholarship that inspired and the backlash that resulted from the release of The 1619 Project, the correlations of British loyalism with Black freedom and American patriotism with slavery is turned on its head in The Painter’s Fire. Unlike enslaved people who took up the offers of freedom in exchange for military service to the Crown in Virginia and elsewhere, Demah volunteered for the Massachusetts militia. Wheatley intentionally returned to the colonies after travelling to England, where she could have remained free. Black folk constantly navigated the dynamic parameters of freedom during the American Revolution and faced difficult decisions.
Everyone should read The Painter’s Fire. It’s a thoughtful but accessible text that takes what readers may think is a familiar narrative in unexpected directions. Readers will learn about politics, yes, but also about the creative and technical processes necessary for these artists to do their jobs. The labor involved in painting portraits, writing poetry, printing engraved images, and sculpting wax models by artists (and sometimes teams of artists), relied on networks of support.
Perhaps most importantly, the question that anchors The Painter’s Fire remains just as relevant today as it was 250 years ago. The Painter’s Fire is bookended by Wheatley’s poem “To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works,” a poem likely written to encourage one of her neighbors in Boston, the enslaved engraver Scipio Moorhead. Anishanslin looked to “the painter’s and poet’s fire” Wheatley delighted in to find patriots in unexpected places. Finding patriots in unexpected places would also be a delight in the political uncertainty of our own times.
Matthew Sparacio is a lecturer of colonial and Native American history at Georgia State University. He mostly posts about dogs and pizza on instagram @calumetsncrowns .
