A More Perfect Atlantic World

Abstract

Samuel Jennings’s Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences has been celebrated as the first abolitionist painting in America. Presented to the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1792, the work employs allegory to link the representation of liberty with the making and unmaking of a revolutionary Atlantic world of slavery and freedom. Using new research and fresh analysis to unpack the history of the painting, and particularly the British context of its creation, I argue that the painting’s active role in propagating the conflicted racial politics of the period has been underrecognized as scholars focused only on its US reception.