The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution

Join us for a Lunch at the Library presentation from Zara Anishanslin who will be discussing her new book: The Painter's Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution.

Told through the lives of three remarkable artists devoted to the pursuit of liberty, an illuminating new history of the ideals that fired the American Revolution.

The war that we now call the American Revolution was not only fought in the colonies with muskets and bayonets. On both sides of the Atlantic, artists armed with paint, canvas, and wax played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals. Zara Anishanslin charts the intertwined lives of three such figures who dared to defy the British monarchy: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. From London to Boston, from Jamaica to Paris, from Bath to Philadelphia, these largely forgotten patriots boldly risked their reputations and their lives to declare independence.

Mostly excluded from formal political or military power, these artists and their circles fired salvos against the king on the walls of the Royal Academy as well as on the battlefields of North America. They used their talents to inspire rebellion, define American patriotism, and fashion a new political culture, often alongside more familiar revolutionary figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Phillis Wheatley. Pine, an award-winning British artist rumored to be of African descent, infused massive history paintings with politics and eventually emigrated to the young United States. Demah, the first identifiable enslaved portrait painter in America, was Pine’s pupil in London before self-emancipating and enlisting to fight for the Patriot cause. And Wright, a Long Island–born wax sculptor who became a sensation in London, loudly advocated for revolution while acting as an informal patriot spy.

Illuminating a transatlantic and cosmopolitan world of revolutionary fervor, The Painter’s Fire reveals an extraordinary cohort whose experiences testify to both the promise and the limits of liberty in the founding era.

This event will take place on Wednesday, September 3, 2025 at 12:00 p.m. ET in Benjamin Franklin Hall and will also be livestreamed. This event is free to attend but registration is required.

Zara Anishanslin is Associate Professor of History and Art History at the University of Delaware. She works on early America and the Atlantic World, with a focus on material culture and public history. She previously taught at CUNY and at Columbia and was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. Her award-winning first book, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, was published by Yale University Press in 2016. For her forthcoming book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution (Harvard University Press, July 2025) she’s been a Mount Vernon Georgian Papers Fellow at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, a Davis Center Fellow in Princeton’s History Department, a Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society and the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellow with the Museum of the American Revolution, working to build bridges between academia and the public. An avid public historian, she’s worked with a number of museums on exhibitions, including the reinstallation of the Early American Wing at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and she is creator/co-host of the podcast “Thing4Things: The History Podcast Where Things Matter and Stuff Happens.” From 2023-25 she was a Fellow at the David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society. But according to her children, the only cool thing on her CV is that she served as Material Culture Consult for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s show, “Hamilton: The Exhibition.”