In The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution, Zara Anishanslin elegantly opens her book by recuperating the moment when Joseph Wright exhibited a portrait of his mother, Patience, at the Royal Academy in 1780. Patience is seen sculpting, in wax, the decapitated head of Charles I. Anishanslin muses on George III’s thoughts upon seeing the picture, as was the custom at RA openings, just as the American War was approaching its spiraling denouement. Did he quietly gasp, perhaps stroke his throat? Today, we would desperately wish to see that picture, but it was lost as the Argo, carrying Joseph and his pictures, ran aground on the Maine coast. 

The scholarly lesson from the shipwreck: be undeterred by cruel fate. A talented historian’s task is to persevere. By all means, retrieve submerged objects from the Maine coast or anywhere else, try to piece together the scavenged bits, unveil artists and objects buried by time and, ultimately, restore full three-dimensionality to those whose tangible remains are lean but intriguing. Anishanslin splendidly does all that over four hundred pages dedicated to The Painter’s Fire.

She could have taken the easier route, as I did when I wrote on the five, document-rich canonical American painters who responded to that war in diverse and showy ways. Instead, Anishanslin focuses on three of what were hundreds of artists and artisans—painters, printmakers, silversmiths, textile designers, ceramicists, jewelers, furniture painters, and powder horn carvers, to name but a few categories of makers—who fulfilled the political and visual needs of the Founding era: Patience Wright (1725–1786), Prince Demah (ca. 1745–1778), and Robert Edge Pine (1730–1788). 

Given the current state of archival knowledge about them, this could have been a slim volume. But working on the premise that social history, art history, and material culture occupy the same investigative space, Anishanslin brings these artists’ lives and works to life. To do that, she turns to multiple adjacencies. That is to say, for example, we can begin to imagine Prince Demah’s experiences in London as an enslaved American if we learn about other Black figures, such as the Jamaican philosopher Francis Williams, who had to navigate the white ways of the metropolitan city. Or for another, we need know how the convoluted legal travails of the patriot  Ebenezer Smith Platt landed on Patience Wright’s doorstep and led to his marriage to her daughter, Elizabeth.

Anishanslin’s argument is that Wright, Demah, and Pine were not marginal to the American Revolution, but that they, in fact, expand the conventional discourse about it to additionally address patriarchy, slavery, and injustice writ large. This is true. But the book expands far beyond its stated claim, by encompassing the many rich and varied transatlantic milieu that the three principal figures occupied.

A prologue and an introduction frame the identities to be encountered ahead: British, American, Tory, Whig, loyalist, patriot, Black, white, male, female, privileged, disadvantaged, free, and enslaved, to name a few. Chapters one through four consider Prince Demah and his African mother who were enslaved to Henry and Christian Barnes, a confirmed loyalist couple living in Boston and then Marlborough. The Barneses recognized—and let’s not forget, thought they owned—Demah’s talent. They ferried him to Britain and saw to it that he be schooled in painting under the tutelage of Pine, whose own story begins to emerge here and reappears in later chapters. One hallmark of the book is Anishanslin’s masterful weaving of biographies, which avoids the urge to divide them into sealed units of the book.

When the Barneses returned to Massachusetts, Demah, perhaps bolstered, as Anishanslin suggests, by an emergent Black abolitionist movement, started to advertise his work and that, in turn, created for portrait-seekers an alternative to John Singleton Copley’s studio in Boston. She folds Phyllis Wheatley, the subject of chapters seven and nine, into Demah’s narrative as a comparative figure with a comparable experience. And not in an abbreviated way. Anishanslin takes full measure of Wheatley, and that may come as a surprise because the book’s title—“the Artists”—does not quite do justice to all of the stories we discover inside. Many fully fleshed-out non-painters make the book a gripping narrative that extends outward in a dozen directions.

The terrified Barneses fled Massachusetts in 1775, leaving Demah behind, their Marlborough house newly occupied by General Henry Knox, whose men ran bayonets through the hearts of the portraits of the loyalist Barneses. In turn, Demah, newly freed, became an independent artist, who, like Charles Willson Peale, joined a local militia company—the Train—and in 1777 set to guarding British prisoners and preparing to defend Boston from a presumed British return. Demah died unexpectedly, probably from smallpox in 1778. Only three works by him survive, but Anishanslin makes the most of them when she pauses to offer exquisite descriptions of what we see—and what Demah always intended us to see—in them.

Anishanslin’s sleuthing pays great dividends with Pine and Wright, the former an intriguing British mixed-race artist with radical republican credentials, who emerges full force in chapter four, and the latter, a radical and bold, if not downright brash widow, who sculpted in wax. Her story and that of her younger sister Rachel occupy chapter five and following chapters.

In 1774, the Intolerable Acts in effect, Wright and Pine moved toward the defining political moments of their careers. For her, it was a move toward espionage, in consort with Benjamin Franklin’s radicalization. She had easy access to the throne and Whigs in Parliament, and because of the nature of wax sculpting, there were hours of convivial and often revealing conversation with major political figures. Moreover, because she was a woman, she was not automatically considered dangerous. But she was acting as a go-between for Franklin and William Pitt, raising funds to help American prisoners of war, and hiding transatlantic intelligence in her wax heads. She was often in conversation with pro-American merchants, such as John Sawbridge, which reminds us that the political landscape of wartime London was astonishingly complex. The Corporation of London, for example, where Sawbridge served as an alderman and mayor, was vehemently opposed to the war and actively supported the Americans.

Wright moved to France, America’s first ally, where she reacquainted herself with Franklin, the American plenipotentiary, then she moved back to London. She hatched an idea for a gallery of American heroes in wax for display at the State House in Philadelphia, where Peale would eventually locate his own gallery. But in 1786, Wright died after a fall. Instead of Wright, it was Pine who emigrated to the United States. He had already painted a prospective allegory of America in 1778, an imaginative work depicting a mythic time of peace and reconciliation for a war-ravaged nation. He took that, and a suite of other patriotic works with him, and under the patronage of George Washington and Robert Morris installed them in the space that Wright had proposed for her own gallery of heroes. 

None of these artists lived long enough to see the ratification of the US Constitution. Though Joseph Wright, Patience’s son, did. He portrayed Washington in paint, clay, wax, and plaster, became the first engraver of the United States Mint, and designed coins with Lady Liberty in profile. One of his students in Philadelphia was the sculptor William Rush.

A note on the word “genius,” which is used more than seventy times to describe the book’s protagonists. In the eighteenth-century, it referred to a prodigy full of promise or a person with natural gifts, and was liberally used and highly nuanced by gender, race, and age. Though we need to talk about who or what constituted genius when we write about those same constitutive aspects now, we should avoid labeling it “genius.”  We need to exit eighteenth-century terminology, or put it in quotation marks, or substitute our own critical language. To be sure, a picky point that receives some clarification (78), but “genius,” following Linda Nochlin’s 1971 essay, is problematic in art historical discourse, and thus it could benefit from a more critical examination.

A note on notes. For those of us who think of endnotes as a book of its own, I suggest scholars binge on Anishanslin’s with interest and satisfaction, starting on page two hundred seventy-one and ending on page three hundred fifty.