American art in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was used as a didactic tool to celebrate the republican and patriotic ideals fostered by the American Revolution. The new values of the Revolution recalled the old virtues of ancient Greece and republican Rome, thus the artistic style that illustrated them to American audiences evoked the style of the classics in its abolishment of everything that was decorative and superfluous. This focus on the essential was what united the American Puritan tradition and the neoclassic style of the late eighteenth century. As art critic Robert Hughes claims in his 1997 book American Visions, "there was no real conflict between the values of American neoclassicism and those of the Puritan tradition; one flowed into the other, sharing a common radicalism."

Paradoxically, the painter who...