Megan Baker

This dissertation reconstructs the early history of pastel painting and drawing between the Seven Years’ War and the War of 1812 in North America to emphasize the politics of media specificity, demonstrating the different ways pastel contributed to the making and breaking of empire during the age of Atlantic revolutions. Pastel, or crayon, artworks unite questions of elite representation, knowledge production, resource extraction, and slavery. By exploring the network of materials, techniques, and individuals involved in the production and circulation of pastels, I argue that the medium’s fugitive materiality made it uniquely suited to depict and document revolutionary fervor and its aftermath. 

Over four chapters, this project charts the pastel medium’s transition from novelty to widely used image type in North America. I look to English- and French-speaking artists, including John James Audubon, Benjamin Blyth, John Singleton Copley, Charles Balthazar Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin, Pierre Eugène du Simitière, and James Sharples, broadening understanding of a period often Anglo-centrically presented. Placing the materials of artistic production in dialogue with artworks and their social histories, I use technical and theoretical methodologies to reveal the physical and social connections entwining nearly every aspect of pastels with the institutions of slavery. Ultimately, I show that the pastel’s alluringly ephemeral surface placed it at odds with the painted portrait’s desired longevity, leading to technological innovations attempting to fix the pastel through reproductive and adhesive processes.  

This dissertation is the first study of North American pastels in a century. It contributes to the history and art history of colonial British America and the early United States, as well as the visual history of the American Revolution, by underscoring the centrality of artistic supplies in debates about liberty and freedom. Pastel images and their material components helped racialize Whiteness, and this study identifies the extractive and environmentally depleting labor practices that enabled the art form’s creation. Drawing on traditional and technical art history, ecocriticism, Atlantic studies, and histories of empire, this dissertation offers a methodologically nuanced approach to studying objects with complex materialities through the history of an individual medium, providing a model for interpreting early America’s vast cultural landscape.