American Art and the Revolution: Why the Market Crossed the Atlantic
Benjamin Franklin’s 1771 prediction that the arts would flourish in America captured a future that was still out of reach for many artists in his own day. The 18th-century art market was already transatlantic, but it was not balanced. Wealth, taxes, patronage, and the size of the customer base made Britain the stronger center, even as paintings, prints, and collectables moved steadily toward the colonies.
Recent economic research complicates the familiar story of colonial dependence. It suggests that American income per head may have exceeded Britain’s until the Revolutionary War, overturning the long-held assumption that the United States did not pull ahead until the 1880s. London merchants were describing New England as “the greate martt and staple” as early as 1676, and by the 1760s and 1770s London’s art and collectables exports were flowing to New York, Pennsylvania, New England, New Providence, Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, and Florida, with little in return.
The Revolution interrupted that exchange. The Anglo-American art trade contracted between 1775 and 1779, then revived in New York the following year. But the broader imbalance remained. Britain’s economy was roughly three times larger than America’s, and the difference showed in the number of commissions available, the scale of private fortunes, and the cost of simply getting across the Atlantic.
Artists responded in different ways. John Trumbull, the American army colonel later known as the “Painter of the Revolution,” was imprisoned in London in 1780. Zara Anishanslin’s The Painter’s Fire (2025) examines three other patriot artists in London, while loyalist feeling was visible too, from Joseph Wilton’s statue of a defiant, armed America at the original Royal Academy in 1780 to Joseph Wright’s 1780 etching, Yankee Doodle, or the Great Satan. After the war, artists also had to navigate Britain’s 1787 sedition laws and the 1798 acts targeting aliens in America.
For many, the decisive factor was not ideology but survival. Johan Zoffany worried about the American war before heading to India. John Singleton Copley split his career between the two countries, spending 20 years in America and 25 more prosperous years in Britain from 1775. Around 30 American artists later worked in London, alongside an estimated 800 mostly native painters in 1770. In the 18th century, artistic ambition often followed the market, and the market followed wealth.
