ABSTRACT
There is a history still to be written on American attitudes towards British art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It will be a rich and complex one for it was not always clear even in the fifty or so years after the War of Independence that Britain or the United States were foreign countries to each other, as painters continued to emigrate from Britain to America, and American painters to study and settle in London. The traditional premise of history painting from its origins in the Italian Renaissance was that it represented the story of an exemplary and heroic deed acted out in the distant or mythical past. John Trumbull (1756-1843) was the most prominent of these young painters, and he sought from the beginning of his career to make contemporary history paintings based on the recent events of the War of Independence.
