Carolyn J. Weekley

The United States’ new capital city was an odd choice for a portrait painter at the end of the eighteenth century. While Boston and New York were centers of artistic training and activity, when Washington was founded in 1790 it was sometimes referred to as the “Mud Hole” and the “Wilderness City.”[1] Washington resident Marcia Burnes Van Ness went so far as to note that the city had “trails for streets that ran between surveyor’s stakes in the tobacco fields.”[2] Adding further color to early accounts of the city, in 1834, William Dunlap, an artist and chronicler of the arts and theater, republished exaggerated remarks by one writer who had described Washington at the end of the eighteenth century as “morass and forest, the abode of reptiles, wild beasts, and savages.”[3] A developing city bustling with building activity, Washington may not have been an artist’s dream locale, but it was … Continued
Cassandra Britt Farrell

John Smith’s maps of Virginia and New England have stood out as important pieces of colonial American history, particularly as they relate to their distinctive regions (Figure 1 and Figure 2). The maps were first published in 1612 and 1616, respectively. To European cultures, the representations of Powhatan’s village and Virginia’s Algonquin population on Smith’s map of Virginia became symbolic of America’s original inhabitants. Many mapmakers, map-sellers, and booksellers of the seventeenth century and thereafter liberally reproduced images found on the map. Smith’s map of Virginia’s Tidewater region was considered the seminal representation of the colony until John Senex published his map of Virginia in the late seventeenth century (Figure 3). Smith’s chart of New England’s coastline is likewise one of the foundational charts of that region’s cartography.[1] Smith’s map is the first time that “New England” was published in reference to lands north of Virginia. The map was used to promote … Continued