#21 Revolutions (Spring 2026)
ARTICLES
Revolution’s Ends—American War, Patriotism, and Culture in a Dilating Eighteenth Century
Emily C. Casey
The Revolution’s Sanctuary: Designing the La Réole Temple of Reason, Year II
Matthew Gin
Three-Fingered Jack: Staging Resistance in the Toy Theater
Monica Anke Hahn
RE-PRESENTATIONS
Finding William Lee: A Black Founder in Early American Portraiture
Zara Anishanslin
Contingent Truths of the French Revolution: Representing the Abolition of Slavery of 1794
Daniella Berman
“My interventions project back what has been erased:” Firelei Báez in Conversation with J. Cabelle Ahn
J. Cabelle Ahn
Issue Editors
Wendy Bellion, University of Delaware
Kristel Smentek, MIT
The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence, a turning point in the American Revolution (1775-1783). Numerous initiatives, exhibitions, and conferences are commemorating and reinterpreting the Revolution’s national, regional, and intellectual legacies. Yet no account of what scholars have termed “the age of revolutions” would be complete without considering the international upheavals that quickly followed 1776, including the French Revolution (1789-99), the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), the unsuccessful United Irishmen’s Rebellion (1798), and the Latin American Wars of Independence (1808-26).
This issue of Journal18 takes a cue from the Declaration itself, a document that foregrounded the very practice—and malpractice—of representation (think “no taxation without representation”). Seven contributors examine afresh the material and visual cultures of late eighteenth-century Atlantic revolutions, exploring questions specific to the political conditions of the revolutions they study while revealing commonalities across cultural transformations.
What actors and artistic media have been privileged and marginalized to date in art histories of revolution in the Atlantic world? How did images purporting to document the American Revolution both foreground and obfuscate the fundamental contradictions of a political freedom that depended on systems of enslavement, colonization, and Indigenous displacement? How were the inconsistencies of the French Revolution’s claims of liberty and equality embedded or elided in its civic performances as well as its image-making campaigns, production of ephemera, and circulation of luxury goods? Why was the Haitian Revolution—the most consequential revolt of enslaved peoples in history—comparatively underrepresented in art (and in the discipline of art history), arguably contributing to what the Haitian scholar Michel-Rolph Trouillot described as its historical “silencing”?
The following essays take up these issues and related matters questions of revolutionary memory, violence, justice, absence, and reinvention. Three full-length articles investigate the ways in which revolution registers across a range of artistic media–paintings, photographs, architectural drawings, buildings, plays, and toy theaters–for generations following the cessation of battles and peace treaties. Emily Casey positions an unfinished oil sketch by Benjamin West documenting the commissioners of the Treaty of Paris (1783), which officially ended the American Revolution, as the departure point for later images and performances that revisited the unresolved nature of the war. Matthew Gin turns to the remaking of French churches as “Temples of Reason” during the French Revolution, showing how the redesign of a medieval sanctuary in the small town of La Réole illuminates the invention and performance of revolutionary ritual far from the metropole. Monica Hahn studies an interactive toy theater based on a popular pantomime, “Three-Fingered Jack,” to consider the propagation and potential disruption of received narratives of Black revolt and resistance in Jamaica well into the nineteenth century.
In Re-Presentations, two shorter essays extend this consideration of Black presence and historical memory in visual representations of revolutions. Zara Anishanslin contends that John Trumbull’s iconic painting of George Washington (1780) presents a racialized stereotype of William Lee, an accomplished horseman and aide-de-camp enslaved by Washington, and suggests how a portrait by Charles Willson Peale painted a year earlier invites us to see Lee instead as a Black Founder of the United States. Daniella Berman identifies negotiations of fact and fiction in Parisian drawings interpreting the 1794 abolition of slavery in the French colonies (five years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) that both center and de-emphasize historical figures of African descent.
Rounding out the issue by turning to the contemporary moment, Cabelle Ahn interviews the artist Firelei Báez, whose mixed-media paintings and installations revisit the people and places of the Haitian Revolution and its reverberations. Thomas Crow reviews the recent exhibition Jacques-Louis David at the Louvre and new scholarship about Jean-Paul Marat.
Together, the contributions to this issue interrogate the when, where, and what of revolution: the extended temporalities of the American Revolution, the less familiar geographies of the French Revolution, and the material and performative cultures that represented revolts by enslaved peoples in the Caribbean. They also test the familiar chronological parameters of the “long eighteenth century” by demonstrating how works of art continue to reassess and unsettle the lessons of Atlantic revolutions through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
Wendy Bellion and Kristel Smentek
Cover image: Detail from John Dixon, The Tea-Tax-Tempest, 1774. mezzotint with gouache, 52.1 x 59.4 cm. Gift of William H. Huntington, 1883. Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.