Declaration of independence picture series#

(The fact-checking website PolitiFact has corroborated Parsa’s count.) In a poignant illustration of this hypocrisy, Arlen Parsa, a Chicago-based documentary filmmaker, covered the faces of every enslaver in the painting with a red circle: a 34 out of the 47 men pictured, most of whom were signers of the Declaration. The concept of freedom, though, was severely limited: slavery was only abolished nearly a century later, and its reverberations of racist violence and mass incarceration subjugate Black people to this day.

John Trumbull’s painting “Declaration of Independence,” which hangs in the rotunda of the US Capitol, commemorates the document that freed the United States, formerly the 13 British colonies, from European rule in 1776. Tanya Pohrt, “Reception and Meaning in John Trumbull’s “Declaration of Independence”,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2013): 117–18, fig. 2.Īlan Shestack, ed., Yale University Art Gallery Selections (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1983).Red dots cover the faces of all the men who enslaved people in John Trumbull’s painting “Declaration of Independence” (1818) (collage by Arlen Parsa) Cooper et al., John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982), 1, 77, pl.

Matheson, Art for Yale: A History of the Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2001), 10 (detail), 13, fig. 10.Įleanor Phillips Brackbill, An Uncommon Cape: Researching the Histories and Mysteries of a Property (Albany: State University of New York, 2012), 96, fig. Cooper et al., Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery, exh. (Fredericksburg, Va.: University of Mary Washington, 2008), 16, ill. Jerry Bentley, Traditions and Encounters, Fourth (Boston: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 2008), 785, ill.ĭavid Preston, James Monroe, exh. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2006), 281, fig. 7.ĭavid McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), 130-131, ill. Herbert Lacymayer, Mozart Experiment Aufkla¨rung im Wien des ausgehenden 18. Of the forty-eight portraits here, thirty-six were taken from life others were copied from an existing portrait or taken of a son as a substitute.Ĭhristopher Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels (Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Military, 2008), ill. Trumbull worked on the Declaration for more than three decades, hoping to include all fifty-six figures, but he was unable to obtain all the likenesses. The goal was to preserve the exact likenesses of those extraordinary individuals-aristocrats, lawyers, doctors, farmers, shopkeepers-who had put their lives and fortunes on the line. They urged that all the delegates be included, even those who were not present or those who had opposed the Declaration and did not sign. He consulted Adams and Jefferson about who should actually be in the scene.

Conscious of creating an image for succeeding generations, Trumbull made the whole committee-John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin-present the document to John Hancock, rather than Jefferson alone, which would have been historically accurate. There, Trumbull wrote, “I began the composition of the Declaration of Independence, with the assistance of information and advice.” Trumbull represents the moment when the committee appointed to draw up the document submitted Jefferson’s draft for the consideration of the Continental Congress.

Declaration of independence picture series#

Greatly impressed with John Trumbull’s plans to execute a series of American history paintings, Thomas Jefferson invited the artist to stay with him in Paris.