Editor’s Introduction

A 1980s ad campaign featuring the phrase “image is everything” underscored the particular power of visual culture. Images can do many things, and this slogan implies the numerous ways pictures can function for creators, subjects, and viewers. While this catch phrase referred to photography, it can equally be applied to portraiture in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Images of people painted in this era could mesmerize, narrate, document, and do so much more. The articles in this issue of Winterthur Portfolio illustrate this point by engaging with the power of portraits in colonial America and the early republic and their entanglements with individuals and communities. The authors of the articles consider portraiture as much more than aesthetically pleasing decoration. Instead, portraits are framed as having a visual power over people’s experiences. They did not simply hang on walls, they activated emotions. In her work on eighteenth-century Virginia portraiture, Janine Yorimoto Boldt skillfully demonstrates how the omission of enslaved individuals from all but three of the 500 known colonial Virginian portraits acted as an additional layer of power and control on the part of white enslavers. Virginia portraits may have been intended to commemorate or celebrate their sitters, but Boldt shows how they also excluded and controlled their viewers. Since curiosity, fear, and desire could be conjured by the painted faces that gazed out from these images, depicting an enslaved person implicitly acknowledged their humanity and threatened to undermine a system built on their forced labor. At the same time, the very people who made the paintings possible through their exertions in and around great houses and plantationswere “active spectators”whoengagedwith the portraits on their own terms in this world of objects and images. While individual early colonial Virginia portraits were seen by relatively small numbers of people in