Art History Professor Susan Rather has been shortlisted for the prestigious, international William M.B. Berger Prize for British Art History for her book The American School: Artists and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (Yale Univesity Press). In the book, Rather examines the status of 18th- and early-19th-century artists from different geographical, professional, and material perspectives: portrait painting in Boston and London, the trade of art in Philadelphia and New York, the negotiability and usefulness of colonial American identity in Italy and London, and the shifting representation of artists in and from the former British colonies after the Revolutionary War, when London remained the most important cultural touchstone. The book interweaves nuanced analysis of well-known artists (John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and Gilbert Stuart, among others) with accounts of non-elite painters and ephemeral texts and images such as painted signs and advertisements, all well represented in this richly illustrated book. Throughout, Rather questions the validity of the term "American,” which she sees as provisional—the product of an evolving, multifaceted cultural construction.
A recent review from Professor and Sewell Biggs Chair in American Art History at the University of Delaware, Wendy Bellion, describes the book:
The subtlety of Rather’s argument may not be apparent from the title—The American School—which, to readers unfamiliar with the references it connotes, might seem to advance an exceptionalist history of American art. Nothing could be further from what the book delivers. The American School takes its name from a celebrated painting of the same title made in 1765 by a young Pratt, who was completing several years of study in West’s London studio. The picture, in other words, posits the emergence of an American artistic practice that takes shape in a place far beyond the geographical extent of North America. Similarly, Rather’s book neither argues for American uniqueness, nor does it reduce colonial art to a provincial mimicry of British culture. Instead, it draws out the nascent character of American and British art during the late Enlightenment era as it illuminates a dynamic of mutual interchange…The result of this approach is a welcome contribution to studies of British and American art, one that, significantly, emphasizes the permeability of artistic fields that tend to be taught as separate histories.
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The American School will join other prominent studies of early American art published in 2016…as required reading for anyone seeking to excavate the complexities of acting as a British colonial artist in a place that was not Britain—or negotiating one’s Americanness for a place that was not yet America.