Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America

By Wendy Bellion

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807838907

Wendy Bellion

Wendy Bellion is associate professor of art history at the University of Delaware.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

In American art history, Charles Willson Peale’s Artist in His Museum traditionally marks the end of an era (Plate 1). Huge in scale and dense with imagery, the painting offers both an autobiographical summary of Peale’s talents and a calculated visualization of his renowned Philadelphia Museum. Surrounded by emblems of his achievements in art and science—a palette and brushes, excavated bones, a dead turkey draped over a taxidermy box—the elderly Peale lifts a heavy red curtain, his illuminated head bowed slightly in greeting and his palm extended in welcome. The curtain frames a view of the organized and impossibly deep space of the museum’s Long Room, the main gallery on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House. The walls are crowded with representative birds and representative men, every case and picture aligned within a strict perspectival field. The hulking skeleton of a mastodon, partially concealed by the curtain as if to evoke the opaque bog out of which it had been exhumed, swells to fill the right side of the room. Nearby, diminutive spectators react to the sights in various ways. A Quaker woman raises her hands in awe before the mastodon; a man crosses his arms in measured study of the creatures on display; a father strolls with his son down the length of the Long Room, one arm extended in imitation of Peale’s demonstrative gesture as the child holds a book, possibly a guide to the collections. Together the latter pair model the metaphor of egalitarian learning—the open book of nature—that for Peale defined the museum’s purpose and authorized its significance within the political culture of the early American republic. The figures offer a fitting complement to the imposing form of Peale, who, mediating an ocular passage from shadow to light, represents himself and his museum as the realization of republican desires for reason, clarity, and order.¹

Less familiar than The Artist in His Museum is an image—or, rather, a pair of images, one actual and one virtual—that overlap this famous painting and complicate both its self-assured narrative of legibility and its status as a symbolic endpoint of the early national period. In preparation for the creation of his grand self-portrait, Peale and his son Titian Ramsay Peale II executed a drawing of the Long Room (Plate 2). Peale employed a drawing instrument to delineate the lines of the gallery, and Titian finished the details in watercolor. Although this study proved helpful to Peale as a guide in painting The Artist in His Museum, its visual interest was unexpectedly amplified when Peale put it to a second use. In August 1822, Peale placed the drawing behind the lens of an optical instrument designed to generate illusions of three-dimensional space. Then he put this assemblage on display in the museum.²

Described interchangeably by Peale as the lens and the magnifiers, the instrument was a small-scale version of an optical device called a cosmorama that Peale had viewed at a New York museum several years earlier. Although it is unclear whether Peale’s lens was mounted within a wall (in imitation of the New York cosmorama) or set within a tabletop box (in the fashion of contemporary perspective boxes or peepshows), the instrument transformed the Long Room drawing into a stunning visual deception. "[Titian’s] drawing looks very handsome seen through the Lens, and will be a good object to place there occasionally, Peale effused in a letter to his son Rembrandt. Two days later, he tested the virtual image on his son-in-law Coleman Sellers. It looks beautiful through the magnifiers, Peale told Rembrandt’s brother, Rubens. Coleman seeing it yesterday, says that it deceived him, he thought he was viewing the Museum in the looking glasses at the end of the Museum. he thinks it might be a good deception, to see it in another room and would have a good effect on Visitors. Rubens shared his father’s excitement, and in December he displayed the drawing in a perspective box at the Peales’ Baltimore Museum. On receipt of the drawing by Titian, I placed it in the optic case instead of the Tyger hunt, and it gives very great satisfaction," he reported.³

Coleman Sellers’s response to the cosmorama of the Long Room is remarkable for several reasons. Most significantly, it compels us to shift our historical gaze away from the well-known painting of The Artist in His Museum to imagine the more unusual sight of a man standing before an ordinary optical instrument, peering through a lens to look at a virtual representation of the museum gallery. Whether or not Sellers was genuinely deceived by the Long Room drawing (perhaps he was simply trying to flatter his formidable father-in-law), Peale’s recollection of the event indicates that Sellers experienced the illusion in a profoundly somatic manner—an experience different in every way from the effects of the enormous painting. Viewed through the lens, the drawing simultaneously functioned to situate and displace Sellers with regard to the space of the Long Room. Peale’s magnifier redoubled the pictorial rationalization of the gallery that the drawing, with its linear geometries, had realized; fixing Sellers in a stationary position, the lens delimited his mobility before an idealized visual field and propelled him into the virtual Long Room, enabling him to imagine himself inhabiting the space. Even as it produced these illusions, however, the magnifier confused Sellers and altered his sense of spatial location. Seeing the three-dimensional image of the gallery, Sellers misunderstood his place within the museum; he believed that he was at one end of the Long Room, looking at a reflection of the room’s contents in a mirror positioned at the opposite end, when in fact he was seeing a magnified image of a small, flat picture. Impressed by the instrument’s powers of visual trickery, Sellers thought of a way to manipulate spectators further: put the instrument in another room, he suggested, in order to create a good deception and a good effect on Visitors.⁴

Did Peale follow his son-in-law’s advice? Did he encourage museum visitors to compare the illusionistic simulacrum of the Long Room to the scene depicted in his self-portrait? If so, how did spectators negotiate between these images—the ephemeral one and the painted one—and relate them to their experiences of the actual museum? We can only speculate about visitors’ responses to this field of intersecting representations, imagining how the multiple images of the Long Room mobilized the spectator’s perception across the physical space of the collections. Yet there are important lessons to be learned from this imbrication of images. Much as the magnifier exercised a dislocating effect upon Sellers, the display of the optical instrument together with The Artist in His Museum disturbs the canonical status of this picture, troubling its iconic singularity within art historical scholarship. Just as important, the relation between the two objects suggests the extent to which Peale’s famous painting was embedded within a material culture of optical pleasure, play, and deceit. Indeed, Peale’s enthusiasm for the visual effects of the Long Room projection indicates that he sensed deception to be of a pair with discernment. Peale himself invites us to see the illusions lurking within enlightenment.

Recast in this light, The Artist in His Museum opens our eyes to the ways in which paintings were experienced as one among many forms of visual deception during the early republic. Instead of marking a chronological endpoint, Peale’s painting can be located as part of a cultural continuum that began to emerge some three decades earlier, when three types of illusions—trompe l’oeil (or fool the eye) pictures, optical devices, and popular spectacles of deception—began to pique the curiosity of early national Americans. This book explores the cultural functions of these objects, charting a visual field in which pictorial and optical illusions tested concepts of understanding, representation, and subjectivity. Setting ordinary instruments into dialogue with canonical paintings, it argues that a cultural dialectic of deceit and discernment took shape across the terrain of a broad material landscape. More specifically, it contends that illusions functioned to exercise and hone skills of looking. During an era in which the senses were politicized as agents of knowledge and action, public exhibitions of illusions challenged Americans to demonstrate their perceptual aptitude. Thresholds for the practice and performance of discernment, deceptions made exhibition rooms into spaces of citizen formation.

Of the three types of objects explored within this study, trompe l’oeil pictures enjoyed the greatest degree of cultural visibility. Between the 1790s and 1820s, the newly formed exhibition spaces of federal-era Philadelphia, in particular the Philadelphia (or Peale’s) Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, featured several dozen highly illusionistic paintings and drawings. Executed by prominent artists as well as little-known drawing masters, cartographers, and skilled amateurs, these images engaged audiences in gambits of observation and discovery, inviting spectators to test their eyes against the evidence of compelling illusions. The optical instruments that formed part of this cultural landscape posed related quandaries of perception and epistemology. In vernacular spaces including taverns, houses, and pleasure gardens, natural philosophers and itinerant showmen displayed devices ranging from magic lanterns, perspective boxes, and solar microscopes to speaking figures, automata, and cosmoramas. Designed to delight the eyes (and sometimes the ears, hands, and nose), such exhibitions evoked responses of pleasure and surprise similar to the response Coleman Sellers expressed before Peale’s lens. By 1800, a third sort of illusionistic spectacle had joined this exhibitionary circuit: the Invisible Lady, a mechanical contraption that for years attracted crowds determined to solve the mystery of a female speaker whom they could hear but could not see. Together this array of artistic and popular illusions engaged audiences in Philadelphia and other early national cities in shared experiences of visual marvel and confusion, uniting Americans separated by language, distance, ethnicity, and custom in a shared inquiry about the possibilities and limitations of looking.⁵

It must be acknowledged at the outset that these three categories of objects were by no means unique to the early United States. The Invisible Lady originated in France and had already tantalized spectators in England by the time a version of the exhibition found its way to Philadelphia. Likewise, optical devices formed part of a late Enlightenment culture of scientific inquiry that spanned the Atlantic world; curious amateurs were just as likely (indeed, more likely) to find microscopes, perspective glasses, and mirrored boxes at optical shops in London and Paris. And trompe l’oeil painting was an artistic practice that dated to the Renaissance. Its forms ranged from quadratura painting in Italian churches and palazzos to easel paintings created for French aristocrats, from grisaille panels ornamenting Dutch town halls to British engravings produced for an expanding print market. Trompe l’oeil had long tickled the sensibilities of European viewers. Much of its appeal rested upon its recognizable visual tricks and intellectual challenges: a highly conventionalized mode of representation, trompe l’oeil recycled a familiar set of pictorial strategies and subjects while engaging questions of metarepresentational significance. Hence, in Europe, as in North America, trompe l’oeil abdicated the high ground of artistic truth and beauty (in other words, the academic genre of history painting) for subject matter that extolled the banal, the imperfect, and the obsolete. By delighting in the precise replication of details, it disdained the age-old Aristotelian rule that imitation should be generalized and nature idealized. And, by favoring shallow pictorial spaces that seemed to push objects forward through the picture plane, it inverted the recessional geometry of linear perspective, the Renaissance system that organized spatial depth and narrative logic. When early American artists such as Peale began to try their hand at trompe l’oeil art during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was precisely to such European precedents that they looked.⁶

And yet the operations of trompe l’oeil, like those of any visual medium, are also keyed to specific historical moments and places. This point must be observed in order to comprehend the cultural work of illusionistic pictures and optical devices in the early United States. Why did American artists begin to make trompe l’oeil pictures in earnest during the post-Revolutionary decades? Why did itinerant showmen find eager audiences for illusionistic demonstrations in the same period? And why did Philadelphia emerge as the center of these activities and exhibitions? In pursuit of such questions, this study reconstructs the physical environments of early national exhibitions in order to understand how pictorial and optical deceptions interpolated their audiences, involving them in participatory experiences of looking. It examines the material structures and visual forms of illusion to investigate how deceptions organized inspection, pleasure, and analysis. It situates displays of illusions within contemporary discourses about the senses, judgment, representation, and deception to consider how the lessons learned through encounters with illusion were carried out of the exhibition room into the everyday world. And, although Peale’s Museum and other sites of artistic exhibition figure prominently throughout the following pages, this study also probes related spaces of visuality and display, everyday places where perception was persistently represented as a mode of discernment—including the statehouse, the market, and the street.⁷

Further, this book attends to the representational equivocations of illusion in the early republic. Not all pictorial and optical illusions operated in the same way, and even the same modalities changed in function over time. While some trompe l’oeil paintings reified familiar ideologies of vision and knowledge, for example, others parodied the didactic claims for depiction that had been advanced during the eighteenth century or mocked Enlightenment faith in the panoptic faculties of sight. Although this book maps an early American culture of visual illusion, it is therefore crucial to emphasize that this culture was neither stable nor constant. Illusion enabled multiple ways of looking and knowing, cultivating discernment yet also resisting explanation. This was a visual culture without a monocular eye.⁸

While this study situates the production and reception of illusions within a set of broadly national (and often nationalistic) discourses, it focuses in particular upon the exhibition rooms of Philadelphia, where citizens learned to use their senses to tell truth from deception. As the second-largest city in the British Atlantic world, Philadelphia was a thriving intellectual, social, and commercial hub. It was a hothouse of political inquiry—the site of the Revolutionary and Continental congresses of the 1770s and 1780s, the seat of the federal government during the 1790s, and a locus for the fiery democratic clubs that arose throughout the eastern states during the same decade—and hence a site where the nature of liberty, rights, virtue, and governance was theorized, debated, contested, and publicized. As a major port of global trade, Philadelphia imported goods from all corners of the world and exported shiploads of raw materials and foodstuffs. The city boasted an international population, a spirit of religious toleration founded upon the Quaker principles of William Penn, and a sizable community of free persons of African descent. It was home to numerous organizations and scores of individuals committed to Enlightenment pursuits of natural history, law, medicine, and philosophy. It supported the development of several artists’ societies, not to mention subscription libraries, charitable organizations, volunteer societies, and a thriving print industry.⁹

Moreover, the city was something of a laboratory for looking, a place where the visual ideologies of the early republic could be put to the test of objects and experiences. Philadelphians encountered visual pleasures as well as dangers in their streets and faced an ever-changing sensory barrage of noise, smells, and sights. They learned to sharpen their ears against the din of urban life and to remain on the lookout for crime and deception (look to your locks! a newspaper cautioned during a spree of burglaries in 1805). Contemporary writers encouraged citizens to cultivate awareness of their sensory abilities by representing the street as a space for the practice of discernment. Advocates for criminal reform proposed to remake the streets into a forum for sociovisual training; urban boosters represented Philadelphia as a place transparently accessible to the eye; and directories, guidebooks, and travel accounts—with their encyclopedic inventories of public buildings, squares, and streets—implied that nothing was concealed from the intrepid observer. City dwellers admired painted windows and storefronts crowded with things to buy; they enjoyed street lamps at night and illuminations during special occasions; they even caught the occasional glimpse of George Washington, as when the president paused one day outside the State House, with all present gazing, in mute unutterable admiration, as one bystander put it. They also participated in the political parades and protests that coursed through the city, watching from the footpaths or joining the crowds in the street as men and women marched to mark the Fourth of July, to celebrate the French Revolution, to honor Washington, to support partisan leaders, to roast enemies and effigies, and to oppose unpopular actions by the federal government (Plate 3). Such events transformed the streets into a civic theater, highlighting spectatorship and display as political practices. They brought the urban habitus of looking and being looked at into relief, revealing the extent to which the city was an arena for seeing and learning.¹⁰

But, of course, not everything was immediately evident to the eye. Disorientation and misperception were the bane of newcomers to Philadelphia. The French traveler Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville was flummoxed by the lack of street signs and house numbers when he visited the city in 1788. His confusion was later epitomized by the misadventures of the farm boy Arthur Mervyn, the fictional protagonist of a Charles Brockden Brown novel of 1798, who experienced the city as a maze of alleys, tunnels, and backstairs. Even the sensory acumen of longtime residents was occasionally challenged by the urban environment. Like their contemporaries in other large cities such as London—the busiest metropolis of the English-speaking world around 1800—Philadelphians had to look quickly and astutely to process the flux of their urban sensorium. They reckoned with the presence of strangers from the country and every corner of the Atlantic world; a multitude of men and women moving and crossing in every direction at the High Street market, as Brissot de Warville remarked; and the relentless growth of buildings upward, westward, and even inward, as developers carved lots into narrow alleys and tiny houses. On the streets, sharpsters stood ready to ensnare unsuspecting passersby. A gamester lay in wait on High Street during the 1780s, tempting the naive to try their hand at the E O table, a wheel of fortune (or rather of misfortune, as one victim lamented) that was elegantly decorated to captivate the eye. Even more disconcerting were the threats that transpired beyond the scope of vision. In 1804, the Board of Health issued a warning about invisible poisons, by which it meant both yellow fever, which had killed thousands during the 1790s, and the West Indians, who were suspected of introducing the illness through the ports. Hence the Board advised both cleanliness and clandestine observation: advising that gutters be flushed and privy pits treated with lime, it also promised to treat tips about foreigners with inviolable secrecy. As if to epitomize the visual challenges of the city, John Upton hung a trompe l’oeil sign of fish and game outside his tavern on Dock Street. Those who recognized the signboard for what it was—a promise of the food waiting inside—could enter the tavern to claim their dinner. Those who failed were no better off than the hungry dog who, mistaking the images for real treats, banged his head against the sign and humbly skulked away.¹¹

Keen vision was crucial to navigating the everyday material worlds of Philadelphia. In order to assess in greater depth the significance of this particular place for practices of illusion, exhibition, and perception, this book delves into the spheres of discourse, knowledge, and experience that helped give shape to this urban life, in particular the spheres of politics, market economics, sociability, science, public display, and print culture. Of these diverse yet overlapping areas of cultural inquiry, two in particular warrant further introduction: the early national cultures of art and politics.

Illusionistic representation posed an implicit challenge to early national expectations of art making. In form as well as function, trompe l’oeil pictures exceeded the roles that had been prescribed for art in the early republic. According to the earnest supporters of the arts who tried to articulate a republican utility for visual representation, painting was meant to be stylistically chaste and semantically transparent. Ideally, proper artistic models—namely honorific portraits and history paintings, images that exemplified human goodness and accomplishment—would lead spectators toward a keener realization of beauty. Scottish Common Sense philosophy, which exercised considerable influence in early national America, helped advance these concepts by asserting that every thinking individual was capable of rational judgment and the recognition of truth. By kindling intellect and moral sensibility among all viewers, art strengthened the community and, by extension, the state as a whole. Such ideas formed the backbone of arguments tendered in support of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts following the opening of this institution in 1807. In the tradition of British philosophers and aestheticians including Shaftesbury, Burke, Kames, and Reynolds, one Academy booster declared that artists would use every exertion in common with their fellow citizens, to promote the prosperity, glory, and independence of their country.¹²

He had a tough audience to convince. Doubters questioned whether the United States had yet reached the point that calls for or justifies expenditures for the arts, protesting that the country was simply too undeveloped to devote resources to this cause. Graver still, painting and sculpture were thought to be not only superfluous but even dangerous to the health of a republic. Critics charged that the visual arts were agents of luxury and self-interest. Pointing to the history of ancient republics, they argued that the arts flourished in the very moment of state collapse. Is it possible to enlist the ‘fine arts’ on the side of truth, of virtue, of piety, or even of honor? wondered the perennial skeptic John Adams. From the dawn of history they have been prostituted to the service of superstition and despotism. Although these suspicions had ancient roots and had already been resuscitated in eighteenth-century political theory, they took on special urgency in post-Revolutionary America, where the stability of the republic was regarded as anything but certain. The people’s character was tied directly to their government: that which corrupted individuals also endangered the polis.¹³

This sensibility could even be detected in the language of republican watchdogs who, invoking an entrenched philosophical association between color, sensation, and deception, represented the materials and techniques of painting as mediums of political illusion. During 1787–1788, when Americans were embroiled in debates over the ratification of the federal Constitution, Hugh Ledlie described the Constitution as a guilded pill; one had to strain to discern the Arsanac and Poison through the outside colouring. Similarly, Mercy Otis Warren warned that gawdy colours threatened to "intoxicate the inexperienced votary, and Arthur Lee charged that one of the Constitution’s framers had ably varnished over the iron trap. Such rhetoric attained new heights in the angry orations delivered by Abraham Bishop around 1800. Invoking printmaking as well as painting, Bishop complained that freedom of the press and freedom of opinion had been restrained for eleven years. Federal measures have been presented to the people highly coloured, and embellished with cuts, he insisted. When Federalists would enslave the people, they present to them pictures of liberty; when they would impoverish them, they present pictures of wealth: when they would lead them to war, they present pictures of peace and security. Delusion can never succeed by exhibiting unadorned fact."¹⁴

Academy leaders tried to temper unease about the arts by reciting a central dictum of neoclassical aesthetics: the arts instilled virtue, not vice, among its practitioners, beholders, and benefactors. The immigrant English architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe pointed to the example of ancient Greece, when art had thrived in the bosom of a republic. Indeed, he famously continued, the days of Greece may be revived in the woods of America, and Philadelphia become the Athens of the Western world. Academy president George Clymer added that patronage of the arts was a suitably republican activity because it provided the rich with a worthy outlet toward which to direct their income, thereby forestalling potential abuses of wealth. If, as he proposed, luxury was a consequential evil of the progress of our country, then the choice was, not between simplicity and luxury, but between the grosser and more refined species of the latter. Moreover, art possessed immeasurable practical utility. Clymer predicted that the Academy would elevate aesthetic taste, offering, as the Port Folio affirmed, an elegant resort for enlightened spirits. Artistic creativity would stimulate industry in manufactures, thereby enhancing the nation’s productivity and economic competitiveness. The demonstrated success of American artists upon their own soil would alter foreigners’ misimpression that the populace was uncultivated and the climate inconducive to growth. Not least, the Academy would embellish Philadelphia, luring the hesitating stranger to Philadelphia as the desirable seat of reason and politeness.¹⁵

Even as these optimistic orators voiced their predictions, however, a number of trompe l’oeil illusions ornamented the Academy’s walls, joining hundreds of other works on display at the annual exhibitions of the second decade of the nineteenth century. And, unlike the sorts of images promoted by the Academy, pictorial deceptions were enigmatic and playful. Instead of supplying moral exempla or memorializing the heroic events of the Revolutionary War, trompe l’oeil possessed the capacity to trouble the civic goals for art outlined by Latrobe and Clymer, to affirm the sensory pleasures of imitation as the proper ends of art. At the same time, however, these images often thematized practices of making and displaying art, employing a repertory of self-referential motifs and strategies to bring the very activity of looking at art into view. In the absence of a substantial audience for art, trompe l’oeil tried to beckon one into being. In doing so, it claimed a public mission of its own. Through its performative tactics of self-referentiality, trompe l’oeil visualized an artistic field that was in the very process of its own becoming. However paradoxical, its emergence in the early United States was as closely tied to the establishment of the nation’s first art academies and the organization of public exhibitions as the hopeful rhetoric of Latrobe and Clymer, the development of public portraiture, and the articulation of a symbolic iconography of nationhood. Far from being irrelevant to a program of civic edification, trompe l’oeil images were as political as any picture of an American eagle or figurative allegory of Columbia.

Emphasizing the demonstrative functions of trompe l’oeil art entails an understanding that perceptual deception was not the only or even primary aim of pictorial deception. Historically, trompe l’oeil has turned upon a singular incongruity: it is a resolutely participatory mode of representation even though, as scholars have observed, it adopts the disguise of vernacular objects in order to slip unnoticed into the field of human vision. Instead of escaping observation, however, pictorial deceptions often create the very conditions for their own detection. Installed upon the walls of art exhibitions and deliberately identified in exhibition catalogues by titles such as A Deception or An Imitation, trompe l’oeil pictures tempted the reach of curious fingers, challenged spectators to recognize artifice, and welcomed sustained inspection of the artistic means by which illusion had been effected.¹⁶

Early modern societies had a word for these processes of revelation and discovery: undeceiving. To be deceived was to exist in a state of delusion or error brought about either through one’s own missteps or the manipulations of another person. To be undeceived was to free oneself or another from deception, cheat, fallacy or mistake, to recover truth through the rational faculties of reasoning and perception. Noah Webster, in his groundbreaking American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), offered an example drawn from his immersion in the Bible: "If we rely on our own works for salvation, the Scriptures may undeceive us." As Webster’s advice suggests, the process of undeceiving was thoroughly bound up with matters of self and subjectivity, for the very possibility of becoming undeceived meant that one had a hope of retaining agency in a world that seemed to be awash with forgers, counterfeiters, plagiarists, conspirators, imposters, and demagogues.¹⁷

It is at this threshold of undeceiving and self-realization that the political culture of the early republic intersects with the display and experience of illusions. Throughout the Revolutionary and early national periods, the capacity to discern differences between truth and falsehood was prized as a sign of able citizenship. Although the discursive construction of sight as a medium of political knowledge hardly owes its origins to the early United States, this period nonetheless marks the beginnings of a pronounced ideological equation between keen vision and patriotism. In pamphlets, broadsides, speeches, and plays, seeing well was equated with good citizenship. Sharp eyes could detect traitors, flush out loyalists, and cut through political machinations. On the eve of the American Revolution, for example, Charles Willson Peale expressed his hope that "the people of Eng:d have by this time their eyes opened and know the Minist:y have dealt ungenerousley with America who is a brave and was a Loyal people. When Peale became active in radical whig societies several years later, he placed a letter in a local newspaper designed to frighten citizens who were concealing loyalists in their homes. Mock-complaining about the inconvenience of asking always who are Whigs before making a purchase of goods—for my principles are such that I would not willingly purchase any article (Except in absolute necessity) of a Tory"—Peale proposed to mark the houses of loyalists and their friends with black paint, thereby making our well known Enemies apparent to the community.¹⁸

Metaphors of vision and visuality continued to color political rhetoric after the Revolution. In an often-quoted passage of The Federalist, James Madison remarked that indistinctness of the object, imperfection of the organ of perception, [and] inadequateness of the vehicle [of] ideas had hindered delegates’ efforts to draw boundaries between the federal and state governments at the Constitutional Convention. Every man will be sensible of this difficulty, Madison appealed to his readers, in proportion as he has been accustomed to contemplate and discriminate objects, extensive and complicated in their nature. If the perception of objects through obscurity was a tool of political judgment, then misperception could readily be construed as the cause of political malfeasance. Thus, in the early nineteenth century, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown charged that the president, Thomas Jefferson, labored under such defect of mental vision, that he seldom sees objects in their natural state and true position: just as when we look through a fog, many things near us are not perceived, and those we see appear larger and nearer than they really are . . . indeed it is impossible he should ever become a statesman; because a clear, distinct, and comprehensive view of objects, with a ready conception of their bearings on each other, is a needful prerequisite.¹⁹

The following chapters have much more to say about the political valences of visual perception during these years. More to the point, they explore the ways in which illusionistic objects reified, contradicted, and occasionally even parodied contemporary ideologies of political looking. By setting discourses of discernment into tension with visual strategies of undeceiving, this book examines how illusions convened opportunities for the practice of visual perception and the performance of republican identities. Did trompe l’oeil’s deliberate confusion of fiction and reality take advantage of a cultural unease—especially pronounced among Federalist leaders of the new republic—about citizens’ abilities to recognize artifice, masks, and designs? Did pictorial replications of tickets, stamps, and bank notes recall warnings about the circulation of paper money "printed in the Form, Similitude and Likeness, of the true and genuine Bills"? To be sure, visual deceptions addressed and exploited such anxieties through a myriad of pictorial strategies. But they also encouraged individuals to look closely and carefully, tuning their senses and scrutinizing surfaces in order to understand how appearances could be manipulated. Situating pictorial and optical deceptions in relation to broader problems of social and political deception reveals the extent to which illusion was implicated in larger dilemmas of authority, knowledge, and identity. Indeed, it was by eliciting spectators’ interest in the methods of imitation and artifice that trompe l’oeil engaged its audience on the proving grounds of republican subjectivity.²⁰

Chapter 1 explores the late-eighteenth-century culture of visual curiosity that was already thriving in Philadelphia by the time artists began showing trompe l’oeil pictures. In the city’s taverns, museums, and private houses, natural philosophers and itinerant showmen mounted exhibitions of optical devices as diverse as magic lanterns, peepshows, and phantasmagorias. Such displays transformed common rooms into theaters of visuality, representing knowledge as a function of vision and engaging ordinary men and women in perceptual challenges relevant to their situation as republican citizens. Craning one’s neck to peer through a monocular lens into a perspective box or staring forward at a wall where virtual insects appeared magnified many times their natural size, audiences at optical exhibitions learned to look in multiple ways and to recognize themselves as part of a viewing community.

This sense of visual self-awareness, of the self as an agent of sensory knowledge, was a core assumption of the competing ideologies of vision advanced during the 1790s by writers of all political stripes. During this famously turbulent decade, when post-Revolutionary aspirations devolved into embittered partisan rhetoric, perceptual vigilance was discursively represented as the right and responsibility of republican citizens. Federalists recommended faith in the superior vision of elected leaders; Anti-Federalists urged eagle-eyed watchfulness over the same individuals. The tenor of this rhetoric reached a peak during the spring of 1795, when, to the fury of Anti-Federalists within and beyond Philadelphia, the United States Senate closed its doors to deliberate the terms of the controversial Jay’s Treaty.

Chapter 2 situates Charles Willson Peale’s creation of the Staircase Group for the historic Columbianum exhibition within these discourses and events (Plate 4). Installed on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House—adjacent to Congress Hall, where the Senate was meeting behind shuttered doors—the Staircase Group mobilized the spectator’s gaze, moving the eye around the space of the building and into the painting to discover a secret buried within plain sight. By activating vision, the painting affirmed citizens’ right to look, reclaiming the State House as a site of political visibility.

Chapter 3 continues to explore the motility of visual perception during the 1790s. A close study of the preliminary drawings and colored engravings executed by William and Thomas Birch for The City of Philadelphia, a folio of twenty-eight prints published in 1800 and better known as Birch’s Views, suggests that the Birches’ images owed more to the artists’ subjective movements within the city than to contemporary paradigms of vision and depiction. Much as Coleman Sellers’s experience before the Peale Museum lens helps illuminate the embodied nature of looking during this period, the Birches’ prints repeatedly insist on an emplaced way of seeing, a mode of vision that is manifested in the representation of exacting standpoints, in the articulation of forms in the near ground, and in a fracturing of urban space that disrupts the ideational logic of the urban grid (Plate 3). In these images, the lived experience of a material environment shapes looking above and against the influence of ideological discourses.

Chapter 4 shows how a single trompe l’oeil artifact—an installation of matching Originals and Imitations donated to the Peale Museum in 1808 by Samuel Lewis, a talented draftsman and cartographer—enacts a similarly complex relation to period ideals of looking (Plate 5). Drawing the spectator close to compare a collection of assorted papers and their trompe l’oeil doubles, Lewis’s pairing exercises the cognitive faculty of judgment, the capacity to identify differences among similarities. It also poignantly demonstrates trompe l’oeil’s propensity for paradox and play, in particular trompe l’oeil’s capacity to persuade a viewer of the reality of a simulacrum even as it exposes the codes by which representation operates. Moreover, by focusing the spectator’s attention on papers that thematize sites of illusion—such as a ticket to the Peale Museum—Lewis’s work suggests the pervasiveness of imitation as a mode of representation and experience during the early republic.

Chapter 5 turns from pictorial and optical deceptions to examine the most popular illusionistic spectacle of the early republic: the Invisible Lady, a mechanical instrument that challenged audiences to determine the location of a female speaker concealed within the environs of an exhibition room. Exhibited often between 1800 and 1820, the Invisible Lady staged a fantasy of the female gaze, subjecting audiences to the observation of a woman who could see and even converse with them yet who remained disconcertingly beyond the pale of vision. Significantly, the many attempts to expose the Invisible Lady in pictures and print during the first decade of the nineteenth century coincide with a period of high anxiety about the disruptive sight and speech of early national women. Enticing, but never fully allowing, audiences to render the Invisible Lady visible, the exhibition at once exposed the gendered terms of discernment in the early republic and marked the limits of the senses as agents of knowledge.

The sixth chapter draws the book to a close by exploring a shift in the forms and functions of pictorial illusion in the 1820s. Whereas trompe l’oeil images had often operated to heighten the spectator’s self-awareness, now popular pictures such as François-Marius Granet’s Choir of the Capuchin Church in Rome and Rembrandt Peale’s Patriae Pater—the so-called porthole portrait of George Washington—immersed viewers in fantasies of longing and nostalgia (Plates 6 and 7). A comparison between the latter painting and Raphaelle Peale’s Venus Rising from the Sea—A Deception (circa 1822) helps illuminate the changing purposes of illusion during this period (Plate 8).

Throughout, this book uses the word spectator to describe the early American audience for pictorial and optical deceptions. Any mention of this term in connection with the long eighteenth century quickly brings to mind the popular London publication the Spectator, written and published by Joseph Addison (with contributions from Richard Steele) between 1711–1712 and 1714. A daily paper that turned a satirical eye on the mores and morals of contemporary life, the Spectator found a ready readership among Britain’s rising middle classes and inspired numerous imitators eager to master the authors’ witty style (Benjamin Franklin among them). Addison’s paper was also required reading for upwardly mobile American citizens. Booksellers routinely advertised the eight-volume collection of the Spectator, and newspapers reprinted extracts from the publication. By the Revolutionary period, early national writers could mention Addison and his paper without introduction, expecting that their readers would understand the reference.²¹

By conjuring the presence of an informed, smart, sociable viewer, the Spectator helped establish a period byword for the concept of an ideal viewer. Curiously, though, despite his insightful commentaries on British life, Addison himself characterized spectator in rather limited terms. While he claimed to have a more than ordinary Penetration in Seeing, he also described himself as a Looker-on. Elsewhere, he noted that spectator was most usually understood as one of the Audience at publick Representations in our Theatres. Samuel Johnson and Noah Webster similarly defined spectator in their dictionaries as "one that looks on; one that sees or beholds; a beholder; as the spectators of a show. In the words of these cultural authorities, spectator implies a somewhat remote observer, an individual who looks but does not actively engage the objects of his vision—one who beholds without influence, intervention, or consequence. Yet the demonstrated reach and influence of Addison’s own publication belies any conception of spectator" as a mere looker-on. In vernacular usage and within the expanded sphere of eighteenth-century print culture, the term connoted a dynamic visual experience, suggesting an individual moved by or motivated to action by looking.²²

Eighteenth-century Continental and British aestheticians, for example, adopted the term to describe the beholder of works of art—a practice followed by Charles Willson Peale and his contemporaries in the United States, as shown in the many primary-source references to spectator that follow in this book. Further, writers on art conceived of spectators as participants in the mental work of understanding, invention, and discernment. Jonathan Richardson suggested that the spectator’s imagination would supply whatever the artist might omit from a picture. More emphatically, Roger de Piles, whose writings were reprinted in a British encyclopedia available in Philadelphia by the late 1780s, argued that true painting (meaning, somewhat paradoxically, imitations so true to nature as to incite deception in the viewer) yielded the power to call to the spectator and force his interest; instead of remaining a distant observer, one was obliged to approach the canvas and derived pleasure from the surprise of the encounter. The publishers of at least three early national newspapers implied a similar sort of close-range optics when they chose spectator as the title of their imprints. (Another fifty-five newspapers published between 1775 and 1820 took as their titles related terms of vision and visuality, ranging from the popular mirror, oracle, spy, and monitor to the infrequent but catchy kaleidoscope, telescope, and reflector.) Just as important, a number of newspaper contributors used the pseudonym Mr. Spectator to issue critiques of contemporary society and politics. In response to one such essay, a testy correspondent replied: Altho’ my magnifying glasses are very good, [I] can discover nothing that needs an answer. You have put me in mind of the Scuttle Fish, which runs into the mud to blacken the water all about her to avoid discovery. With its evocation of optical aids and tactics of opacity, this witty rejoinder suggests the extent to which the very concept of spectator was embedded in a cultural dialectic of vision and invisibility.²³

If the literature of print culture helps suggest the pervasiveness of spectator as a suitable term for the idea of an active viewer—an individual whose subjectivity is formed to some degree by visual ideologies and visual experience—evidence of actual spectators’ encounters with objects of illusion is slimmer. The account of Coleman Sellers before Peale’s lens is something of a rarity (and even that account comes secondhand, from the pen of Sellers’s father-in-law). Although Peale, especially in his later writing, discussed his creation of and intentions for some trompe l’oeil illusions and occasionally relayed the approving comments of his audience, he was altogether silent on the effects of