Finding Black Founders in Iconic Early American Portraits
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This is event is being held online. After registering, connection information will be emailed to you.
Join us for an Art at Noon featuring one of PAFA's iconic early American portraits, George Washington at Princeton (1779) by Charles Willson Peale, to discuss popular images of America's Black Founders through focusing on William Lee, Washington's enslaved valet. Lee was the only person Washington freed immediately in his will, and he did so, as he put it, "for his faithful services during the Revolutionary War." Lee was famous in his own time for his impressive equestrian skills and his role in the Revolution and his image was and is often associated with a painting by Trumbull. But looking at his image through PAFA's Peale portrait gives us a different picture, and a window for reexamining the artistic importance of Black artists and sitters in the era of the American Revolution.
Image: Charles Willson Peale, George Washington at Princeton, 1779, Oil on canvas, 93 x 58 1/2 in., Gift of Maria McKean Allen and Phebe Warren Downes through the bequest of their mother, Elizabeth Wharton McKean, 1943.16.2.
The Art At Noon lectures are supported by the Behrend Family in memory of Rose Susan Hirschhorn Behrend, a former docent at the Academy and a great supporter of its education programs.
Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. She works on early America and the Atlantic World, with a focus on material culture and public history. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. Her first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016) was the Inaugural Winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s Biennial Book Prize in 2018 and a Finalist for the 2017 Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women’s Historians. For her current project, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, forthcoming July 2025) she’s been a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department, and a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow with the Museum of the American Revolution, working to innovate doctoral training and build bridges between academia and the public. She is currently a Fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society and creator/co-host of the forthcoming podcast “Thing4Things: The History Podcast Where Things Matter and Stuff Happens.” But according to her children, the only really cool thing on her CV is that she’s been on the Travel Channels “Mysteries at the Museum” show and served as Material Culture Consult for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, “Hamilton: The Exhibition.”