Footnotes
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1. | Barbara Maria Stafford, "Think
Again: The Intellectual Side of Images," The Chronicle of Higher
Education (20 June 1997), B6-7. back |
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2. | Ibid., B7. back |
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3. |
Research for this paper was conducted with the generous support of
fellowships from Winterthur Museum, Library, and Gardens; the Henry
Luce Foundation; the American Council of Learned Societies; and the
Library Company of Philadelphia. back |
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4. | Charles Willson Peale to Rembrandt and Rubens Peale,
23 June 1803; in Lillian Miller, Sidney Hart, and Toby Appel, eds.,
The Selected Papers of Charles Willson Peale and his Family [hereafter
abbreviated as Selected Papers], vol. I, Charles Willson Peale, an
artist in revolutionary America, 1735-1791 (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press for the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution, 1983), 537. back |
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5. | My discussion of the history of physiognotrace machines
in the United States is indebted to three publications: Peter Benes,
"Machine-Assisted Portrait and Profile Imaging in New England after
1803," in "Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast,"
Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 19
(Boston, 1996), 138-150; Ellen Miles, "1803--The Year of the Physiognotrace,"
in ibid., 118-137; and Miles, Saint-Memin and the Neoclassical Profile
Portrait in America (Washington, D.C.: A Barra Foundation book co-published
with the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1994).
My paper in part takes up Peter BenesÕs intriguing, but unexplored,
comment that "machine imaging" in America "reached its height almost
half a century before the advent of daguerreotypy and photography,"
so that "the kind of influence exercised by daguerreotypes on American
portraiture after 1839 may have been preceded by a comparable influence
from physiognotraces and optical viewers after 1790." Finally, a note
on nomenclature. I frequently use the word "profile" in a way that departs
from its familiar twentieth-century connotation: in the eighteenth-century,
"profile" was synonymous with "shade" and "silhouette," and these terms
were used interchangeably to mean the images created by physiognotraces.
back |
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6. | For further discussion of this portrait, see Carrie Rebora
and Paul Staiti, with Erica E. Hirschler, Theodore E. Stebbins Jr.,
and Carol Troyen, John Singleton Copley in America (New York:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1995), 275-78. back |
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7. | Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory
of Painting (London, 1792), 13-14. back |
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8. | Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, Robert R.
Wark ed. (New Haven and London: Published by the Paul Mellon Centre
for Studies in British Art (London) Ltd. by Yale University Press, 1975),
259. back |
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9. | William Blake later protested vehemently
against Reynolds's distinction between the general and the particular.
Blake viewed the representation of minute and particular details as
the necessary foundation of artistic representation. "Singular & Particular
Detail," he wrote, "is the foundation of the Sublime." See "William
Blake's Annotations to Reynolds' Discourses," in ibid., 297 and
284-319; and William Blake, The Note-book of William Blake. Called
the Rossetti Manuscript, Geoffrey Keynes, ed. (London: The Nonesuch
Press, 1935). back |
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10. | Reynolds's eleventh discourse presents the most thorough
discussion of "minuteness" and the related notions, "exact," "particular,"
"excessive," etc.; see Reynolds, 191-204. back |
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11. | On Copley's portrait of Ann Tyng, see Rebora et al.,
176-78. Casting aristocratic women as shepherdesses was a favorite convention
of British portraitists. back |
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12. | On Copley's portraits of Warren, Pickman, and Sargent,
see ibid., 85-87 and 193-96. On likeness as a fictional construction,
see T.H. Breen, "The Meaning of 'Likeness': American Portrait Painting
in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society," Word & Image 6 (October-December
1990), 325-50. back |
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13. | See Mary Hammond, "The Camera Obscura" (Ph.D. dissertation,
Ohio State University, 1986); and Martin Kemp, The Science of Art:
Optical Themes in Western Art from Brunelleschi to Seurat (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 1990), for discussions of the variety
of optical instruments invented to assist both artists and non-artists
in graphic representation. Camera obscuras were frequently advertised
in U.S. newspapers, but there are scant records of their use by American
artists. According to Benjamin West, the painter William Williams used
a camera obscura to draw landscapes and let West borrow it; see David
Howard Dickason, William Williams, Novelist and Painter of Colonial
America, 1727-1791 (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press,
1970), 25. In 1818, James Banton used a camera obscura to create a watercolor
drawing, still extant, of the General Post Office in Washington, D.C.
A later optical device, called the "camera lucida," was used by Capt.
Basil Hall to draw "The Bridge Across Lake Cayuga" in 1827-28, and by
government surveyors during the mid-nineteenth-century. See Josephine
Cobb, "Prints, The Camera, and Historical Accuracy," in American
Printmaking Before 1876: Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy (Washington,
D.C.: Library of Congress, 1975), 3-5. back |
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14. | Miles 1994, 39-43. back |
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15. | Robert Dossie, The Handmaid to the Arts (London,
1758). back |
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16. | Robert Bradberry, The Principles of perspective, explained
in a genuine theory, and applied in an extensive practice, with the
construction and uses of all such instruments as are subservient to
the purposes of this science (Edinburgh: printed for J. Ainslie,
1790). Maya Hambly, Drawing Instruments 1580-1980 (London: Sotheby's
Publications, 1988) describes the full range of perspective machines
invented during the eighteenth-century. Several artists created their
own versions of these instruments in the United States. In 1788, Philadelphia
painter Charles Willson Peale built and used an unidentified kind of
perspective machine to make panoramic landscape drawings from the top
of the State House in Annapolis, Maryland; see Selected Papers
vol. I, 493-503. The British immigrant Francis Guy constructed a tent
with a transparent panel for making landscape drawings in Baltimore
during the 1790s; see J. Hall Pleasants, Four Late Eighteenth-Century
Anglo-American Landscape Painters (Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian
Society, 1943). In 1791, New Hampshire teacher Benjamin Dearborn advertised
another invention; see "Description of a Simple Machine for Drawing
in Perspective...," Universal Asylum 1 (February 1791), 67-68.
back |
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17. | "Physionotrace" was spelled "physiognotrace"
when it was adapted by artists in the United States. Miles 1994, 43-45,
is the source for my discussion of Chrétien's
physiognotrace. back |
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18. | Ibid., 65. back |
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19. | Ibid., 47-60. back | |
20. | See ibid. for a comprehensive account of
Saint-Mémim's life and art. back |
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21. | A reconstruction of Hawkins's physiognotrace, built with
funding from the Friends of Independence National Historical Park, is
on view in the Second Bank of the United States, Philadelphia. For a
full description of Hawkins's invention, its methods, and the profiles
it produced, see ibid., 106-113; Edgar P. Richardson, Brooke Hindle,
and Lillian B. Miller, Charles Willson Peale and His World (New
York: Harry N. Abrams, 1983); and David Brigham, Public Culture in
the Early Republic: Peale's Museum and Its Audience (Washington,
D.C. and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 68-82.
back |
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22. | Peale lauded this aspect of Hawkins's physiognotrace
in the advertisement that he placed in the Philadelphia newspaper Aurora
on 28 December 1802: the device was so simple that "any person without
the aid of another can in less than a minute take their own likeness
in profile. This curious machine, perhaps, gives the truest outlines
of any heretofore invented, and is placed in the Museum for the visitors
who may desire to take the likeness of themselves or friends." In
Selected Papers vol. II, part I, Charles Willson Peale, the artist
as museum keeper, 1791-1810, 478. back |
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23. | The Collins family album in the collection of the Library
Company of Philadelphia features profiles pasted upon blue-painted paper.
back |
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24. | "Mr. Shaw's Blackman," also in the collection of the
Library Company of Philadelphia, is one of the few other extant profiles
of an African-American sitter. Brigham examines this image in relation
to the racial constituency of visitors to Peale's Museum; see Brigham,
71. back |
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25. | Charles Willson Peale to Raphaelle Peale, 16 July 1803;
Selected Papers vol. II, part I, 542: "I have just spoken to
a Gentleman who says he was at your Room in Norfolk which was so crouded
[sic] that he could not get his profiles. Moses has made him a good
one, being from Carolina he did not at first relish having it done by
a Molatto, however I convinced him that Moses could do it much better
than I could." On Williams's skill, see Peale to Hawkins, 17 May 1807;
Selected Papers vol. II, part II, 1014. back |
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26. | Rembrandt Peale, "Notes and Queries. The Physiognotrace,"
(1856), 308. back |
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27. | Benes, 144. Benes notes that several of the
homemade physiognotraces in use in New England were camera obscuras
or "shadowgraphs." See also Miles 1996. back |
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28. | Malbone listed "a pentagraph and a small box" among the
objects he temporarily deposited in the care of a friend during ca.
1805; see "Account book and register of portraits, 1794-1807, of Edward
Green Malbone," Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Ephemera, Winterthur
Museum, Library and Gardens. back |
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29. | On Raphaelle Peale, see Selected Papers vol. II,
part I, 541-42 and 582-83; and vol. II, part II, 710-11, 750-51, 790-91,
844-46, 939, 980, 1008-11, and 1018-19. On Greenwood, see Georgia Brady
Barnhill, "Extracts from the Journals of Ethan A. Greenwood: Portrait
Painter and Museum Proprietor," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian
Society 103:1 (1993), 91-178. back |
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30. | Benes, 139. back |
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31. | Peale to Hawkins, 17, 22, and 25 December 1805; Selected
Papers, vol. II, part II, 916. back |
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32. | Raphaelle Peale, for example, advertised four profiles
for twenty-five cents, and would hand-color these (likely with watercolors)
for five dollars. By contrast, he charged twenty dollars for a painted
miniature portrait, and fifty dollars for an oil portrait. (Raphaelle
Peale's oil portraits were typically life-size representations of sitters'
heads, arms, and upper torsos.) See Selected Papers, vol. II,
part II, 751. The cost of obtaining a profile at Peale's Museum was
included in the twenty-five cent admission fee, although visitors contributed
one cent extra for the cost of the paper; Brigham, 70. back |
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33. | See Miles 1994, 27-60. back |
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34. | Lavater first published his theories of physiognomy in
Von der Physiognomik (Leipzig, 1772). The first illustrated editions
followed in 1775: Fragmente--Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Befrderung
der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe, 4 vols. (Leipzig, 1775-78).
This was translated into French in 1781, and into English in 1788-89.
(Full citations for the many editions of Lavater are given in Joan K.
Stemmler, "The Physiognomical Portraits of Johann Caspar Lavater," Art
Bulletin 75:1 (March 1993), 151-68.) Excerpts of Lavater's translated
English text first appeared in the United States in "Extracts from a
Treatise on Physiognomy," New Haven Gazette, and the Connecticut
Magazine I: 41 (23 November 1786), 318-19 (cited in Brandon Brame
Fortune, "Portraits of Virtue and Genius: Pantheons of Worthies and
Public Portraiture in the Early American Republic, 1780-1820," Ph.D.
dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1986, 218).
The full edition was published in the U.S. in 1794: Essays on Physiognomy;
for the Promotion of the Knowledge and the Love of Mankind... (Boston:
printed for William Spotswood & David West, 1794). In addition to Stemmler,
other recent studies on Lavater include Stafford, Body Criticism:
Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Criticism (Cambridge,
Mass., and London: MIT Press, 1991), 84-103; Stafford, "ÔPeculiar MarksÕ:
Lavater and the Countenance of Blemished Thought," Art Journal
(Fall 1987), 185-92; and Victor Stoichita, A Short History of the
Shadow (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 153-167. See Miles 1994,
p. 219, n. 21 for additional references. back |
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35. | Lavater 1794, 218-21. back |
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36. | Ibid. back |
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37. | Charles Willson Peale's letters indicate that he used
profiles in part for this purpose. In 1805, Peale commented on the personality
of his son-in-law Alexander Robinson, whom he disliked: the "head of
the form which nature has given to Mr. Robinson" evinced obstinacy,
wrote Peale. "...I believe Lavater would pronounce the same, I will
consult him the first leisure opportunity as a tryal of my judgment
in Physiognomy." Peale to Nathaniel Ramsay, 17 March 1805; in Selected
Papers vol. II, part II, 816. See also Peale to Deborah Jackson,
8 January 1807, in ibid., 998-999. back |
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38. | On the social uses of silhouettes, see Brigham, and Anne
Verplank, "Facing Philadelphia: The Social Functions of Silhouettes,
Miniatures and Daguerreotypes, 1760-1860," (Ph.D. dissertation, College
of William and Mary, 1996). back |
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39. | Cited in Miles 1994, 44. William F. Pinchbeck, who toured
the United States with his wondrous "pig of knowledge" and later authored
Witchcraft: of the Art of Fortune-Telling (Boston, 1805) to expose
his pig's deceptions, contested claims that one could readily obtain
clear outlines using the physiognotrace: "I have to observe, that many
trials will be necessary before you take a complete profile. Much depends
on place [sic] the person in a proper attitude, or perhaps you will
suffer the tracing point to err from the line of the face." Quoted in
Benes, 150. back |
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40. | Ibid., 107. Several of Peale's contemporaries
made life casts. These included one of Washington made by Joseph Wright,
and the many casts of political luminaries made by New York sculptor
John H.I. Browere. back |
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41. | Charles Willson Peale to Thomas Jefferson, 28 January
1803; in Selected Papers vol. II, part I , 483-85. back |
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42. | "Edmund" [Raphaelle Peale], "On seeing Eliza's Profile,
drawn with the facietrace, by Mr. Peale," Federal Gazette and Baltimore
Daily Advertiser (13 June 1804); reprinted in Selected Papers
vol. II, part I, 710. back |
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43. | Benes, 146. back |
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44. | Haley's poem was reprinted in The Cabinet of Genius;
containing all the theory and practice of the fine arts (New York:
Thomas Powers, 1808), 21-22. back |
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45. | On the popularity of the Corinthian maid narrative in
the eighteenth-century, see Ann Bermingham, "The Origin of Painting
and the Ends of Art: Wright of Derby's Corinthian Maid," in Painting
and the Politics of Culture: New Essays on British Art 1700-1850,
John Barrell, ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
135-164. Other discussions of this subject include Jacques Derrida,
Memoirs of the Blind (Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1993), 49-51; George Levitine, "Addenda to Robert Rosenblum's
'The Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism',"
Art Bulletin 40 (December 1958), 329-331; Robert Rosenblum, "The
Origin of Painting: A Problem in the Iconography of Romantic Classicism,"
Art Bulletin 39 (December 1957), 279-290; Mary D. Sheriff, "Art
History: New Voices/New Visions," Eighteenth-Century Studies
25:4 (Summer 1992), 427-434; Richard Shiff, "On Criticism Handling History,"
History of the Human Sciences 2:1 (1989), 63-87; and Stoichita,
123-127, and 153-155. back |
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46. | On Paul and Woodside, see Joan Dolmetsch, "Four children,
three artists," Antiques 91 (April 1967), 500-502; For Kearny's engraving,
see The Cabinet of Genius (op. cit. 44). back |
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47. | Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of Ancient Art,
Alexander Gode, trans. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1968);
and Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture,
Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton, eds. (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court,
1987).
back |
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48. |
For a brief but salient overview of neoclassical drawing, see Jeffrey Fontana's guide to the Fogg Art Museum exhibition, "Timeless Beauty: Representing the Ideal in Neoclassical Drawing," Harvard University Art Museums Gallery Series no. 27. See also Hugh Honour, Neo-Classicism (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 111-14; and Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967). Charles Willson Peale reified the theoretical associations between line and truth in the writing machines, or "polygraphs," that he developed contemporaneously with the physiognotrace. These instruments enabled a writer to produce multiple copies of a document as he wrote it. Peale's advertisements for the polygraph, and his extensive correspondence with Jefferson about it, reveals that he believed it to be the most precise and dependable means of making copies that had yet been invented. "None but those who have seen the POLYGRAPH, can conceive the facility with which it permits the varied motions of the Pen, without embarrassment or delay, although every motion is communicated to another Pen, which produces not only a true copy, but a fac simile of the letter"; Poulson's American Daily Advertiser, 26 February 1807; reprinted in Selected Papers vol. II, part II, 1005. For Peale, the truthfulness of the polygraph rested in part on the fact that it eliminated the need to hire a second person to make copies of one's own writing. Peale feared that such scribes could not be trusted to faithfully replicate or transmit correspondence. Benjamin Henry Latrobe endorsed the polygraph in similar terms: "It never betrays the confidence it receives,--for though it repeats every thing entrusted to it,--it never publishes a hint of its Masters secrets, and in this respect sets an example not always followed by confidential Clerks"; Latrobe to Peale, 8 June 1805; in Selected Papers vol. II, part II, 848. In his autobiography, however, Peale noted that his efforts to market the polygraph to congressmen in Washington, D.C. failed largely because the latter worried that the polygraph could be used to deceitfully imitate another's writing: "Although many members of Congress see the exact copy made in the same moment and with great care that the original was written, yet not a single member purchased, some of them said that they thought it a dangerous instrument, as any name might be made by it so like that a man may be deceived, not being able to know a copy of his own name, therefore dangerous for its facility of counterfeiting"; The Collected Papers of Charles Willson Peale, 1735-1885 [microform] Lillian B. Miller, ed. (Millwood, N.Y.: published for the National Portrait Gallery, 1980): Series II-C/18, fr. F9. Peale's correspondence and other discussions of the polygraph are reprinted in Selected Papers, vol. II, part II. back |
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49. | The historical opposition of color and line has been
discussed by numerous scholars. See especially Jacqueline Lichtenstein,
The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical
Age, Emily McVarish, trans. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University
of California Press, 1993), 138-195. back |
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50. | William Gilpin, Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty;
On Picturesque Travel; and On Sketching Landscape: to which is added
a Poem, on Landscape Painting (London, 1794), 72. back |
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51. | Henry Fuseli, Lectures on Painting, in Ralph Wornum,
ed., Lectures on Painting, by the Royal Academicians. Barry, Opie,
and Fuseli (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1848), 385. back |
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52. | On Americans' anxieties about art as luxury, see Joseph
J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1979); and Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural
History of the American Revolution, 1763-1789 (New York: Thomas
Y. Crowell, 1976). back |
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53. | "Facietrace," Boston Gazette (13, 20 September
1804); Selected Papers, 750-51. back |
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54. | Gordon Wood, "Representation in the American Revolution,"
(Charlottesville: Published for the Jamestown Foundation of the Commonwealth
of Virginia by the University Press of Virginia, 1969), 1. back |
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55. | On virtual and actual models of political representation
during revolutionary and post-revolutionary America, see Wood; also
Jack R. Pole, Political representation in England and the origins
of the American Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971). back |
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56. | Cited in Wood, 3. back |
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57. | My analysis of the structures of visual and political
representation is indebted to Richard Bernheimer's fascinating discussion
of this subject in The Nature of Representation: A Phenomenological
Inquiry (New York: New York University Press, 1961). back |
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