Citizen Spectator - (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American Histo) by Wendy Bellion

Book Synopsis

In this richly illustrated study, the first book-length exploration of illusionistic art in the early United States, Wendy Bellion investigates Americans' experiences with material forms of visual deception and argues that encounters with illusory art shaped their understanding of knowledge, representation, and subjectivity between 1790 and 1825. Focusing on the work of the well-known Peale family and their Philadelphia Museum, as well as other Philadelphians, Bellion explores the range of illusions encountered in public spaces, from trompe l'oeil paintings and drawings at art exhibitions to ephemeral displays of phantasmagoria, "Invisible Ladies," and other spectacles of deception.

Bellion reconstructs the elite and vernacular sites where such art and objects appeared and argues that early national exhibitions doubled as spaces of citizen formation. Within a post-Revolutionary culture troubled by the social and political consequences of deception, keen perception signified able citizenship. Setting illusions into dialogue with Enlightenment cultures of science, print, politics, and the senses, Citizen Spectator demonstrates that pictorial and optical illusions functioned to cultivate but also to confound discernment. Bellion reveals the equivocal nature of illusion during the early republic, mapping its changing forms and functions, and uncovers surprising links between early American art, culture, and citizenship.

Review Quotes

"Bellion shows that deceptive illusions were not mere diversions for the citizens of Philadelphia circa 1800 but were embedded in the Enlightenment pursuit of rationality and anxieties about republican politics. These insights bring a fascinating array of artifacts into focus."--Michael Leja, University of Pennsylvania

"Eye-opening, original, and provocative, Citizen Spectator recasts early national citizenship as a politicization of the senses. A fascination for optical illusions in art and science tested Americans' ability to discern authenticity from deception. Bellion proves just how important that test was in the early republic. She reminds us of its importance still."--Joseph Roach, Yale University

"A dramatic and delightful exercise in undeceiving. . . . [Bellion's] work will have broad appeal beyond art historians to historians of early American as well as literary and cultural scholars."--William and Mary Quarterly

"An adept analysis of visual phenomenology and political ideology, Bellion's book provides an important model for work on the relationship between eighteenth-century art and politics while inevitably inviting many questions."--Eighteenth Century Studies

"Admirable and groundbreaking . . . . Significant both for its extensive research into the culture of spectatorship in Philadelphia and for the ways in which it opens up further modes of inquiry for scholars interested in the Early National period."--Association of Historians of American Art

"Among the most significant book-length studies of early American art to appear in print during the past decade."--Common-Place

"Bellion is a skilled expositor of images, and each of her essays leaves us with a deeper understanding of works we might imagine were plumbed long ago."--Journal of American History

"Lavishly illustrated, Citizen Spectator makes an original and persuasive argument for the importance of visual perception to the culture of the early republic. Like the objects it studies, it shows that looking can be both a pleasure and serious business."--Journal of the Early Republic

"This magisterial book explores the objects and environments that shaped vision and citizenship in early America. From magic lantern shows to solar microscopes, trompe l'oeil paintings to printed views of Philadelphia, Wendy Bellion considers a wide range of cultural productions."--Early American Literature

"With its careful contextualization and detailed, historical analysis of the cultural forms of illusion, this book firmly locates its discussion of early national visuality within the cultural practices of everyday life and thus makes a substantial contribution to the empirical history of spectatorship in the United States."--American Historical Review

About the Author

Wendy Bellion is professor and Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History and associate dean for the humanities at the University of Delaware.