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.

Genres: Art History, Art, Material Culture, History

388 pages, Hardcover

First published February 1, 2011

Reviews

[David Bates · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wendy Bellion, in her 2011 work Citizen Spectator, examines the cultural significance of trompe l’oeil paintings and other artistic installations that fooled the senses of their audience. In the first three decades of the Republic the city of Philadelphia hosted numerous ingenious showings in which real stairs vanished into painted stairways, magic lanterns painted unreal worlds out of light, and perspective boxes and lenses intrigued viewers with their illusions. “Designed to delight the eyes (and sometimes the ears, hands, and nose), such exhibitions evoked responses of pleasure and surprise,” writes Bellion, but she argues that they also had a more sober purpose. In tune with other artistic trends that embraced and symbolized the new nation, Philadelphia’s skillful tricksters were responding to the challenges of creating a republican society. “The sense of visual self-awareness, of the self as an agent of sensory knowledge,” Bellion writes “was a core assumption of the competing ideologies of vision advanced during the 1790s by writers of all political stripes.” The strife between Federalists and Republicans emerged through a shared political culture that framed disagreement as, at best, error and at worst (and more commonly invoked politically) sinister corruption and conspiracy. While Federalists touted faith in the vision of leaders drawn from the leading ranks of society to guide and preserve the new nation, Republicans enjoined a watchful, anxious scrutiny on the part of citizens to the same ends. Illusionist artwork was produced according to Bellion with an eye to the education of the people of the new republic, training their minds and senses to keenly observe and untangle chimeras from verities. But if establishing a singular agreed upon truth by recognizing and disregarding deception was the theme of some works, other illusions crystalized the lessons that experience taught about living in a nation of openly contested worldviews. “For early national Americans, technologies of optical projection and introspection brought invisible worlds into visibility” Bellion tells us, “they materialized phantoms, magnified miniscule creatures, pulled faraway things near, and transported spectators across great distances. In so doing . . . audiences at optical exhibitions learned to look in multiple and sometimes contradictory ways.” Being a spectator, or the citizen of a sprawling democracy, meant continually adjusting one’s focus.”

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent examination of the various mechanisms through which discerning citizens actively engaged in various art, illusion and visual perception exhibitions in order to craft themselves as discerning subjects.

[Cynthia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bring back the phantasmagoria at the Peale Museum in Baltimore!