Katelyn Crawford
- Fellowship Type
- Predoctoral Fellow
- Fellowship Name
- Terra Foundation for American Art Predoctoral Fellow
- Affiliation
- University of Virginia
- Years
- 2012–2013
- Itinerant Portraitists in the Late Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World
This study will consider the ways a group of five itinerant portraitists and the people who sat for their portraits adopted local influences while working within the visual conventions emanating from London to represent themselves and shape perceptions of their surroundings. Moving through New England and the mid-Atlantic, south into the Lowcountry, overwater to the West Indies, and finally to Britain, the portraits produced in each of these regions will be examined primarily through the canvases of John Greenwood (1727–1792), Joseph Blackburn (ca. 1730–1778), Matthew Pratt (1734– 1805), Philip Wickstead (uncertain–1778), and John Wollaston (active 1742–1775), artists unified by their professionally-based itinerancy. The prodigious artists comprising this loose group were technically trained and able to produce stylish and sizable paintings that evoked praise from patrons and viewers in Britain and the colonies. This dissertation will analyze how portraits produced by itinerant artists in the British Atlantic were simultaneously shaped by a mobile visual vocabulary and literal mobility among occupants.