Portraiture was the dominant form of American painting in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. At first, the cost and limited availability of artists, most of them born abroad and influenced by English artistic trends,restricted painted likenesses to the upper class. To this small group, portraits were an expression of self-worth that reinforced or suggested wealth and social position. In the years after the American Revolution, an increasingly affluent and status-conscious middle class demanded access to material goods. This new rank of Americans used the portrait to express their pride in societal and economic accomplishments and their likenesses became a reflection of their own self-image. Increased desire for such portrayals led to an extraordinarily productive period between 1820 and 1840 for artists, many of whom were born in this country.

While elite academic artists focused on landscape and historical painting driven by English and European aesthetics, the majority of nineteenth-century painters in this country produced portraits in response to consumer demand. In an era before photography, portraiture served as the only means to capture a visual record of a person. They were important documents at a time when family units were vital to social and economic survival, especially during a period when mortality rates were high.

Portraits also served as an expression of worldly status, and they filled the emotional need of sentimental remembrance. Artists on the Move: Portraits for a New Nation,gathers portraits painted between 1790 and 1840. Drawn from its decorative arts and folk art collections, the assemblage celebrates the rich visual breadth of work created in the formative years of this country. The show explores important concepts surrounding portraiture, including westward migration, regionalism, collecting, consumerism, artistic development, and nationalism. Selections also highlight the movement of artists from coastal regions to newly settled inland areas of the country. While as a whole the thirty-plus portraits are a reflection of the ideals that embodied our new country, individually each painting represents the uniqueness of its subject, maker, and the time in which it was created.

Traditionally, the notion of artists traveling from town to town in search of commissions has focused on New England folk painters. But research reveals that a large number of geographically diverse portraitists, both academically inclined and selftaught, traveled not only within the northeastern United States but throughout the West and South. In pursuit of economic opportunity, painters followed potential leads near and far from home, often journeying into recently settled regions of the new nation.