Related Blog Posts:

Janine Yorimoto Boldt, “Jack Custis, Race, and the Unseen in Colonial Virginia Portraits,” August 31, 2020.

—–. “Using Colonial Virginia Portraits: Exploring a Visual Archive with Students,” April 2, 2020.

—–. “When the Past Still Hangs in the Parlor,” November 19, 2019.

 

Photoarchives:

Reference information and images for paintings in private collections were collected primarily from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) Object Database (available online at http://mesda.org/research/object-database/) and the Frick Art Reference Library and Photoarchive (FARL) (available at https://www.frick.org/research/library). The Winterthur Decorative Arts Photographic Collection (DAPC), the Catalog of American Portraiture (https://npg.si.edu/portraits/research/search), the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Virginia Portrait Index, and the Clarke County Historical Association Records were also consulted. 

 

For more on specific artists and portraits from Virginia, see:

Relatively little has been published on colonial portraiture from Virginia. These are some recent books and articles that focus on artists and portraits with a history in Virginia. 

Janine Yorimoto Boldt, “‘Constantly to look at me’: Slavery and the Development of Colonial American Portraiture,” Winterthur Portfolio (Summer/Autumn 2022): 127-166.

Janine Yorimoto Boldt, “Lucy Parke Byrd’s Body: Viewing Female Authority in Colonial Portraiture,” in Pleasing Truths: Power and Portraits in the American Home, edited by William A. Strollo (DAR Museum, 2023): 11-22.

Janine Yorimoto Boldt, “The Portrait of Hanadagá•yas; or, George Washington Reconsidered,” American Art (Summer 2022): 6-12.

Janine Yorimoto Boldt, “The Story of Edward Hill and the African Groom at Shirley Plantation,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art (Fall 2020)

Richard K. Doud, “The Fitzhugh Portraits by John Hesselius,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (April 1967): 159-173.

Graham Hood, Charles Bridges and William Dering: Two Virginia Painters, 1735-1750 (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1978)

David Meschutt, “John Wollaston’s Portraits of the Randolph Family Owned by the Virginia Historical Society,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography (October 1984): 449-473.

David Meschutt, “William Byrd and His Portrait Collection,” MESDA Journal (May 1988): 18-47.

Lillian B. Miller, et al., eds. The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and His Family, 5 vols. (New Haven: Published for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution by Yale University Press, 1983-2000)

Charles Coleman Sellers, “Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1952): 1-369 and “Charles Willson Peale with Patron and Populace. A Supplement to “Portraits and Miniatures by Charles Willson Peale” with a Survey of His Work in Other Genres,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society (1969): 1-146.

Carolyn J. Weekley, Painters and Paintings in the Early American South (New Haven: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in association with Yale University Press, 2013)

 

For overviews of portrait painting and practices in colonial America, see:

These books and articles provide overviews of portrait painting as a social practice in colonial America. They also provide overviews of the artists working in the colonies and some of portraiture’s various social functions. 

T.H. Breen, “The Meaning of ‘Likeness’: American Portrait Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society,” Word & Image (October-December 1990): 325-350.

Wayne Craven, Colonial American Portraiture: The Economic, Religious, Social, Cultural, Philosophical, Scientific, and Aesthetic Foundations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Painters, Artisans, and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005)

Ellen G. Miles, “Artists’ Materials and the Transatlantic Craft Traditions of Eighteenth-Century American Portrait Painting,” in A Material World: Culture, Society, and the Life of Things in Early Anglo-America, edited by George W. Boudreau and Margaretta M. Lovell (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019): 83-104.

Susan Rather, The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2016)

Richard H. Saunders and Ellen G. Miles, American Colonial Portraits, 1700-1776 (Washington, D.C.: Published by the Smithsonian Institution for the National Portrait Gallery, 1987)

Jennifer Van Horn, Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art during Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022)

Carolyn J. Weekley, Painters and Paintings in the Early American South (New Haven: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in association with Yale University Press, 2013)

 

Further reading in eighteenth-century portraiture:

These books and articles provide more information about portraiture that help place colonial Virginia portraits in a broader context, including a selection of readings on British portraiture.

Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016): especially chapters 12-15.

Karin Calvert, “Children in American Family Portraiture, 1670-1810,” William and Mary Quarterly (January 1982): 87-113.

Nika Elder, “In the Flesh: John Singleton Copley’s Royall Portraits and Whiteness,” Art History (November 2021): 948-977.

Roland E. Fleischer, “Emblems and Colonial American Painting,” American Art Journal (1988): 3-335.

Charlotte Ickes, “The Sartorial and the Skin: Portraits of Pocahontas and Allegories of English Empire,” American Art (Spring 2015): 82-105.

Susan E. Klepp, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2009): chapter 4, “Beauty and the Bestial: Images of Women”

Agnes Lugo-Ortiz and Angela Rosenthal, eds., Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)

Ellen G. Miles and Leslie Reinhardt, “’Art Conceal’d’: Peale’s Double Portrait of Benjamin and Eleanor Ridgely Laming,” The Art Bulletin (March 1996): 57-74.

Ellen G. Miles, ed. The Portrait in Eighteenth-Century America (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993)

Kevin R. Muller, “From Palace to Longhouse: Portraits of the Four Indian Kings in a Transatlantic Context,” American Art (Fall 2008):  26-49.

Marcia R. Pointon, Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1993)

Deborah I. Prosser, “‘The rising Prospect of the lovely Face’: Conventions of Gender in Colonial American Portraiture,” in Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast, edited by Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University for the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 1994): 181-200.

Susan Rather, “Carpenter, Tailor, Shoemaker, Artist: Copley and Portrait Painting around 1770,” The Art Bulletin (June 1997): 269-290.

Leslie Reinhardt, “Serious Daughters: Dolls, Dress, and Female Virtue in the Eighteenth Century,” American Art (Summer 2006): 32-55.

Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 2006)

Timothy J. Shannon, “Dressing for Success on the Mohawk Frontier: Hendrick, William Johnson, and the Indian Fashion,” William & Mary Quarterly (January 1996): 13-42.

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: Addison Gallery of American Art in Association with the University of Washington Press, 2006)

Jennifer Van Horn, The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 2017): chapters 2 and 4.