These Daring Revolutionary-Era Artists Promoted the Patriot Cause From the Heart of Enemy Territory

A new book explores how painters, sculptors and writers, especially women and people of color, used their craft to advocate for American independence while living in George III’s capital city

Karin Wulf - History Correspondent

July 1, 2025

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What did the American Revolution look like?

As the United States hurtles toward the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding on July 4, 1776, certain subjects seem to dominate the iconography of American independence. Portraits of George Washington. The text of the Declaration of Independence. Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

But one of the most iconic depictions of the Revolution, Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, was actually painted much later, in 1851. Another familiar image of American grievances, an engraving of the 1770 Boston Massacre, predates the conflict by five years. It was created by Paul Revere, who was not only the most famous of the midnight riders to warn the countryside around Boston in advance of the Battles of Lexington and Concord but also a skilled silversmith and engraver. Revere’s print, which pits aggressive, organized redcoats against a passive group of ordinary people (and a dog), was intended to stir opposition to the British soldiers stationed in Boston. It remains an effective work of propaganda, misrepresenting just about everything that happened in that pre-revolutionary conflict.

Historian Zara Anishanslin wants the public to understand the power of art actually created during the Revolution, and to appreciate works that are lesser known now but were just as potent at the time as some of these famous images. A expert on material culture at the University of Delaware, she has a self-proclaimed “thing for things” (also the title of her new podcast).

Anishanslin’s new book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution, offers a fresh picture of the war by sharing the histories and artworks of artists who were part of a cosmopolitan, trans-Atlantic world.

We’re used to hearing about how American colonists were inspired by political texts like the Declaration or the words of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, but as Anishanslin tells Smithsonian magazine, visual, performing and literary arts also boasted a unique ability to reach Colonial audiences. Art “allows you to imagine, allows you to connect” both with other people and with political possibilities, she says. Male and female artists alike, including people of color, created art in this spirit of revolution. In prints and oils, in sculpture, and through poetry and drama, artists and writers like Prince Demah, Robert Edge Pine and Patience Wright promoted the American cause while working in the heart of enemy territory: London.

To mark the release of The Painter’s Fire on July 1, Smithsonian spoke with Anishanslin about art, politics and the different picture of the American Revolution that her research reveals. Read on for a condensed and edited version of the conversation.

Revere’s print of the Boston Massacre is such a powerful work, presenting one version of a contested event where, by some accounts, the crowd—not the British soldiers—were the aggressors. Yet Revere was able to persuasively show the opposite. Why is this iconic image different from the art of the American Revolution that you write about?

Revere’s Boston Massacre is probably the most famous example of art as propaganda during the era of the Revolution. People who identified with the patriot cause would think that the propaganda of the print was fabulous, right? Because even more than the text that usually accompanied it in pamphlets, that visual was the thing that really struck people. It created a visual narrative in which the British soldiers were clearly at fault, firing into the crowd of innocent, unarmed, mostly well-dressed men. Not everything about that narrative is wrong, but it really fired people up, pun intended. That’s something that art does.

Tell us more about your central cast of characters. Some of the folks you write about are better known to us, like the poet Phillis Wheatley, but your three central figures—Demah, Pine and Wright—may be new to readers.

Like the internationally famous Wheatley, the first published Black woman poet, who also traveled to London, Demah was enslaved in Boston. They were both among a small but important core of Black creative people who were driving a lot of these ideas about revolution and the production of artistic themes related to them. The family that enslaved Demah, the Barneses, recognized his talent. They called him “Black Hogarth” [after the English painter and engraver William Hogarth], and they hoped he could be a famous portrait painter. So they took him to London, where he trained with Pine. Demah then went back to Massachusetts, where he did indeed become a portrait painter, and he enlisted in the Massachusetts militia during the war.

Pine was born in Britain to an artistic family. His brother Simon was a miniaturist, and he married a woman who painted portraits of their children, some of whom grew up to be artists as well. But Pine’s father, John, was the really interesting linchpin to this story, because he was a big deal artistically speaking. He was an engraver appointed to work on designing royal seals for England’s George II, which meant he was very good at what he did.

We know because of a portrait painted by one of John’s best friends, fellow artist Hogarth, that he was also pretty obviously a man of African descent. So Pine may have decided to train Demah because he does see genius in him, but also because they have this shared African descent. Pine was so sympathetic to the Americans that he moved to Philadelphia after the war.

Wright was raised in New Jersey, and she and her sister were successful wax sculptors up and down the East Coast of North America—sort of Madame Tussaud before Madame Tussaud. A fire ripped through her New York City-based museum [in 1771]. Wax figures are made of turpentine, wax and wood and wear actual clothing, so they’re quite flammable. Wright decided to relocate to London, where she opened what became a wildly successful wax museum right in the center of the social and political heart of the city. She arrived in London not long after Demah had gone back to Massachusetts, so they barely missed one another, but she did overlap with Pine in London through their artistic networks, certainly, but also family networks.

Putting all of these people together and seeing their connections reminds us that they’re each exceptional, but they’re not unique. A really important takeaway is that one of the reasons we don’t know more about Black creatives in the past is the same reason we don’t know more about women artists in the past: because they have been left out of the narrative. It’s not because they weren’t part of it.

What inspired you to examine these overlooked historical figures?

The whole book was really inspired by visiting the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and seeing a [1773] portrait that Demah painted of a man named William Duguid. That portrait is amazing. And equally amazing is the fact that the brooch or pin that Duguid wears in it on his coat survives and [was previously] displayed next to the painting.

By contemporary art historical standards, this portrait might not seem as aesthetically pleasing, or Demah’s work as talented as that of artists like John Singleton Copley and Benjamin West. But the Duguid family obviously cherished it enough to keep both the painting and the brooch. And they knew because Demah signed the portrait that it was painted by this formerly enslaved artist. [Editor’s note: As Anishanslin writes in The Painter’s Fire, “The words Prince and Demah are large and bold, with the name Barnes small by comparison.” Demah’s enslavers, the Barnes family, were loyalists, and they left Massachusetts in the mid-1770s. It isn’t clear whether they formally manumitted Demah, but he acted as a free man from that point, staying behind in America and dropping the surname Barnes when he enlisted in the militia in 1777.]

You can look at these little bits of surviving archival documentary or material evidence, and you can recreate whole historical worlds from there.

Why is London such an important setting for your book and for these artists?

With this book, I wanted to reclaim patriotism [and contextualize its origins] in inclusive cosmopolitanism. American patriotism is often associated with white political men on the Eastern Seaboard of North America. But in the 18th century, it was very cosmopolitan. A lot of men and women who considered themselves American patriots were British or lived in London or traveled around the Atlantic.

Also, Black people were always among the most cosmopolitan residents of this Atlantic world, and also some of the most revolutionary for a variety of reasons. People like Demah were traveling this world and meeting a variety of people along the way, getting exposed to new ideas from new places and new people. Wheatley, too, comes from Africa, goes to Boston and then goes to London not long after Demah. Some of the most cosmopolitan people in their tiny metropole of Boston are the Black or mixed-race people.

One of the challenges you faced is that not all—or even much—of the artwork these individuals created, the works that made them celebrated in their own time, survives today. How do you convey what their art meant if you can’t actually see it?

One thing that I would love for people to take away from this book is not to assume that when you go to a museum, you’re seeing the complete picture. You wouldn’t assume, if you’re reading one man’s letters, that you’re getting the full picture. You have to read other people’s letters. Thinking about what we no longer have from the past is just as important to this research as looking at the documents and the other things that still do exist in archives and collections.

Prince Demah and the Profession of Portrait Painting

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It was a really interesting research process, because sometimes I was looking for things that no longer exist, or things that we only know existed because they were mentioned in documents such as newspapers, even though they themselves no longer exist—at least that we know of. There’s a painting that I opened the book with, no longer extant, that may have been lost somewhere in a British attic or something, but I [personally] think it was lost in a shipwreck [when the artist, Joseph Wright,] was en route from France, actually, to make a sculpture of George Washington. Usually it wasn’t something as dramatic as a shipwreck: It’s simply the destructiveness of the revolutionary era.

Early in the book, you talk about a moment when George III and his wife, Queen Charlotte, confronted that very political painting, Mrs. Wright Modeling a Head in Wax, which has since disappeared.

Yes, this was a picture created by Patience Wright’s son, Joseph, of his mother, the wax sculptor. She was famous for modeling wax heads under her skirts—as she put it, warming the wax between her thighs. Obviously, there’s more than a little sexual innuendo here.

In this painting, which was reported in the newspapers as having been displayed at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1780, she’s holding on her lap a finished but decapitated head of Charles I, England’s king, who was famously executed by his own people during the English Civil Wars in the 17th century. George III and Queen Charlotte actually saw it when they visited the show, and you can imagine their reaction was not very favorable.

There were hundreds of paintings in the show, but this was one of only maybe five that were discussed in the newspapers. There were people in London who were pro-American enough to say in British newspapers that this was a painting that really stood up for the constitutional rights of all Englishmen. Depending entirely upon your point of view, it was either a brilliant depiction of the reminder of what the people could do to the monarch if he was tyrannical, or it was a treasonous overreach attacking the foundations of government.

Living in London, are there other ways that these artists expressed their political views and even influenced the course of the American Revolution?

Wright was just as passionate a patriot as [future first lady] Abigail Adams. Something they shared was that both of them were frustrated that their patriotism was limited by the fact that they were women. Abigail famously wrote to her husband, John Adams, to “remember the ladies” when Congress was making laws in the 1770s. And Wright wrote to her correspondent, and someone she had modeled in wax, the Pennsylvania politician John Dickinson, that “women are always useful in grand events,” and essentially that she was at his disposal for political work in London.

Wright wrote to another friend and subject, Benjamin Franklin, saying similar things when he moved to Paris to work on the Franco-American alliance. She’s basically saying to him, “Don’t discount women. We can help you with your revolution.” The difference is that while Adams was sort of forced to funnel her revolution, her patriotism, through her husband, being an artist allowed Wright to give expression to her patriotism.

Wright was also well placed to become a spy and serve her country in a very different way. Her wax museum was the primary site where she gathered intelligence, because it was a place where British aristocrats, members of Parliament and wealthy American merchants who were in London all visited, and they gossiped and talked about politics and life in general. She gave a really compelling account of the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, who knew her from when they’d both lived in New York. He’d come to the wax museum and try to convince her to change her politics.

So Wright was in a position to gather intelligence, but then she actually ships information across the Atlantic to her sister, who’s still operating a wax museum in Philadelphia, inside the wax heads that she was making in London. We know that people like John Adams visited her sister when they were taking a break from the Continental Congress, getting the information that was in the letters tucked inside those wax heads. So Wright’s art is literally a vehicle for her spying, but it also reflects her passionate, creative response to patriotism.

Why did it matter that these folks were all artists? Is there a special connection between art and revolution?

Art gives us a sensory and intellectual history of the American Revolution that is outside of the one that is so familiar to us. So while the Continental Congress matters, and the Continental Army matters, they’re on the fringes of this story. Washington and Franklin matter, but they’re not the central actors. These artists are operating outside of the formal networks of power. They were not sitting in Congress; they were not sitting on a horse leading the charge in battle.

They allow us to see not just a visual image of the Revolution, as they helped to create the propaganda and commemorations of it, but also how art is an engine of politics, and art is a driver of revolution. Art is the way more people on the ground experienced the Revolution. So many more people saw Pine’s pro-American paintings, which were turned into prints that circulated widely in London, than chatted with John Hancock, for example. More people saw Dickinson’s head or Franklin’s head in Wright’s London wax museum than probably read Dickinson’s famous essays.

There’s something inspirational about art that allows you to imagine, that allows you to connect. Sometimes artists are just quirky people because they live in worlds that are fueled by imagination as much as intellect, or by emotion as much as by rationality. They’re keen observers of human faces and forms, too. And I think that these perceptive observers of human emotion and embracers of imaginative possibility are perfect revolutionaries.

Karin Wulf | | Read More

Karin Wulf is the director of the John Carter Brown Library and a historian at Brown University. She was previously the executive director of the Omohundro Institute of American History & Culture and a professor of history at William & Mary.