Ralph Earl, Recorder for an Era

Here at long last is the study of the life and paintings of Ralph Earl, the colorful eighteenth-century American artist whose pictures hang in the great galleries but about whom relatively little has appeared in print. A pioneer landscapist in a day when portraiture was the vogue, a Tory in Revolutionary New England, he nevertheless captured the stance and spirit of the new nation in the first decades after the Revolution. He portrayed the merchants and civic leaders of the time, often with their families, in their homes, orchards, business establishments--and the result is a record of post-Revolutionary American dress, design, and decoration as well as face and figure.

Professor Goodrich has tracked down and assembled forty-one of Earl's paintings for this book, providing the first opportunity of viewing the artist's work as a body. The pictures range from a youthful re-creation of the Battle of Concord, through portraits done in England (whence he fled during the Revolution and which enabled him to absorb the techniques of the great eighteenth-century English portraitists), to his invaluable paintings of General von Steuben, Mrs. Alexander Hamilton, and other figures in the young United States.