To accompany our virtual exhibition, Franklin in Portraits, join us for the second in a series of talks about Benjamin Franklin’s most famous portraits over the years. Find the exhibition on the free Bloomberg Connects app.

This portrait commemorates Benjamin Franklin’s famous kite and key experiment and the invention of the lightning rod but was painted after Franklin’s death in 1790. It was originally meant to be part of a larger piece for the Philadelphia Hospital, an institution founded by Franklin. West met Franklin when he was in London as the second president of the Royal Academy of Arts.  

Dr George Boudreau is a cultural historian of early Anglo-America, specializing in the history of Philadelphia, the work of Benjamin Franklin, material culture, and public history. Boudreau was the founding editor of the journal Early American Studies, and has won six major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a fellow at Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington in 2019-20 and has previously completed fellowships at the Jamestown Rediscovery and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur Museum and Library, the American Philosophical Society, and the David Library of the American Revolution. A 1998 Ph.D. from Indiana University, he is currently senior research associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and is a member of the Academic Advisory Panel for Benjamin Franklin House.

Carol Eaton Soltis is Project Associate Curator in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Department of American Art. Focusing on its collection of antebellum portraiture and portrait miniatures from the 18^th to the 20^th century, she also oversees the museum’s remarkable collection of the art by America’s first artistic dynasty, the Peale Family.

She received her doctorate in the History of Art from the University of Pennsylvania with a dissertation titled, “‘In Sympathy with the Heart,’ Rembrandt Peale, an American Artist and the Traditions of European Art.” As author of the first substantive catalogue and exhibition on Rembrandt Peale, Rembrandt Peale, A Life in the Arts (Historical Society of Pennsylvania), she later joined the Smithsonian’s Peale Family Papers, where she assembled a catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt’s work and co-curated the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, Rembrandt Peale, 1778-1860, In Pursuit of Fame.

Her most recent book, The Art of the Peales, Adaptations & Innovations, published by Yale University Press, is an in-depth catalogue of PMA’s unparalleled Peale Collection, which contains oil portraits, watercolor on ivory miniatures, still life pictures, landscapes, drawings and prints by fifteen different Peale artists spanning the 1770’s into the 20^th century. Written as a narrative, to highlight the connections between the individual artists and their work, it was honored in 2018 by The Athenaeum of Philadelphia as an “outstanding work of non-fiction by a Philadelphia author.” Her most recent article, “Yarrow Mamout and the Charles Willson Peale Portrait of 1819,” appeared in The Muslim World, A Journal Devoted to the Study of Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Special Issue: Black Muslim Portraiture in the Modern Atlantic, Guest Editor, Zain Abdullah, v. 110, no. 3 (Summer 2020).

Aside from lectures and articles on a variety of nineteenth century American artists, she co-curated and co-authored the exhibition and catalogue, Thomas Sully, Painted Performance (Milwaukee Art Museum and Yale University Press, 2013). The first major exhibition of Sully’s work in thirty years, it examined his portraiture in the context of his life-long interest in the theatre and integrated his subject pictures into a consideration of his career and artistic production.

As part of the team that has been working on the re-interpretation and dramatic re-installation of PMA’s new American galleries prior to 1840, she is anxious for their scheduled opening this May. Dr. Soltis has served as a trustee of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and is a trustee emerita of the Library Company of Philadelphia, which was founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1731. She is also a partner in the digital database project, Reconstructing Philadelphia’s Earliest Museums, 1774-1827 with Dr. John Van Horne, Emeritus Director of The Library Company of Philadelphia. Their project will document the contents of the museums of Pierre Eugène Du Simitière and Charles Willson Peale and is hosted by the American Philosophical Society, another Philadelphia Institution founded by Franklin (1743).

Thursday 11 March, 12pm ET/5pm GMT. Register here. 

To celebrate the launch of our virtual exhibition, Franklin in Portraits, join us for the first in a series of talks about Benjamin Franklin’s most famous portraits over the years. We begin our series with a discussion on what is widely believed to be the earliest known portrait of Benjamin Franklin painted by Robert Feke in 1738-1746. This lesser known portrait, currently part of Harvard Museum of Art collection, depicts Franklin as a traditional gentleman typical of the period. Dr George Boudreau will be in conversation with Professor Zara Anishanslin to discuss the significance of this early portrait and the wider context of 18^th century portraiture.

Dr George Boudreau is a cultural historian of early Anglo-America, specializing in the history of Philadelphia, the work of Benjamin Franklin, material culture, and public history. Boudreau was the founding editor of the journal Early American Studies, and has won six major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a fellow at Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington in 2019-20 and has previously completed fellowships at the Jamestown Rediscovery and the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, the Library Company of Philadelphia, Winterthur Museum and Library, the American Philosophical Society, and the David Library of the American Revolution. A 1998 Ph.D. from Indiana University, he is currently senior research associate at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and is a member of the Academic Advisory Panel for Benjamin Franklin House.

Professor Zara Anishanslin specializes in Early American and Atlantic World History, with a focus on eighteenth-century material culture. Anishanslin received her PhD in the History of American Civilization at the University of Delaware in 2009, where her dissertation won the prize for Best Dissertation in the Humanities.  In 2011, it also won the University of Pennsylvania’s Zuckerman National Prize in American Studies, and was the basis for her book Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2016), which was a Finalist for the Best First Book Prize from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians and the Inaugural Winner of (Benjamin Franklin’s own!) Library Company of Philadelphia’s Biennial Best Book Award. In 2019-20, she was a Barra Sabbatical Postdoctoral Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She also held postdoctoral fellowships as a 2014-15 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the New-York Historical Society and the Patrick Henry Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University in 2009-2010. In 2018-19, Anishanslin was the Mount Vernon Fellow at the Georgian Papers Programme of King’s College University of London and the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. She also served as Material Culture Consultant for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton: The Exhibition in 2018-19. She is currently a fellow at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, working on her new monograph, London Patriots: Transatlantic Politics, Material Culture, and the American Revolution.

 

Wednesday July 7th 2021, 5pm BST/12pm ET. Register here. 

Join us for the July instalment of Ben’s Book Club, a monthly virtual gathering looking at themes relating to Benjamin Franklin, the 18th century, and American history. 

This month we will be talking to Michael D. Hattem about his book, ‘Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution’ which illustrates how colonists’ changing understandings of their British and colonial histories shaped the politics of the American Revolution and the origins of American national identity. 

Between the 1760s and 1800s, Americans stopped thinking of the British past as their own history and created a new historical tradition that would form the foundation for what subsequent generations would think of as “American history.” This change was a crucial part of the cultural transformation at the heart of the Revolution by which colonists went from thinking of themselves as British subjects to thinking of themselves as American citizens. Rather than liberating Americans from the past—as many historians have argued—the Revolution actually made the past matter more than ever. Past and Prologue shows how the process of reinterpreting the past played a critical role in the founding of the nation. 

Michael D. Hattem is a historian of early America, with a focus broadly on culture and politics in the long eighteenth century. He is the Associate Director of the Yale-New Haven teachers Institute and the Yale National Initiative to strengthen teaching in public schools. Previously, he served as Visiting Faculty at The New School in 2017-2018 and as Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Knox College from 2018 to 2020. 

You can purchase a hardcopy of ‘Past and Prologue: Politics and Memory in the American Revolution’ here. You can purchase the Kindle edition here. 

Join us even if you don’t have a chance to read the book by the event date! 

This event is free of charge but please consider making an online donation here to support the work of Benjamin Franklin House. 

 

Join us for the April instalment of Ben’s Book Club, a monthly virtual gathering looking at themes relating to Benjamin Franklin, the 18^th century, and American history.

This month we spoke to Christer Petley about his book ‘White Fury’, which tells the story of sugar planter Simon Taylor, one of the wealthiest and most influential slaveholders of the eighteenth-century British empire.

Petley uses Taylor’s rich and expressive letters to allow us an intimate glimpse into the aspirations and frustrations of this wealthy and powerful British slaveholder. The letters provide a fascinating insight into the merciless machinery and unpredictable hazards of the Jamaican plantation world; into the ambitions of planters who used the great wealth they extracted from Jamaica to join the ranks of the British elite; and into the impact of wars, revolutions, and fierce political struggles that led, eventually, to the reform of the exploitative slave system that Taylor had helped build . . . and which he defended right up until the last weak scratches of his pen.

‘White Fury’ details the importance of sugar and slavery to the eighteenth-century empire, the rise of the Caribbean planter class, and the struggle over the future of slavery that took place during the Age of Revolution.

Christer Petley is a Professor in History at the University of Southampton. He is a member and former Chair of the UK Society for Caribbean Studies and a member of the Association of Caribbean Historians.

You can purchase a hardcopy of ‘White Fury’ here. You can purchase the Kindle edition here.

This event is free of charge but please consider making an online donation here to support the work of Benjamin Franklin House.