Get up close and personal with the faces of the American Revolution.
Powered by data from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.
Shakespeare said you can't read a mind from a face. Plato thought you could. Billy Joel sang we all wear masks. The truth sits somewhere between. We project meaning onto faces because we want them to tell us something real. Sometimes they do. Usually, they just show who's been given the chance to be seen.
In early America, portraits were that chance. They weren't about likeness; they were about visibility. To be painted was to exist in history. It meant wealth, proximity, and an artist who decided your face was worth keeping. The National Portrait Gallery's collection makes those choices visible. It's less a record of a nation's people than of who it chose to remember.
This project treats those portraits as data. Each dot marks a portrait made during or soon after the Revolution. Dates were standardized for consistency. Together, they chart fluctuations in portrait production of a young nation trying to find its face.
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1795 was the year America sat for its portrait. Painter Gilbert Stuart showed up in Philly and suddenly every Revolutionary hero wanted their face on a canvas. His George Washington portrait became the reference image, getting practically Xeroxed across the new republic.
In early America, size was status. Miniatures lived in pockets and lockets, meant to be held, not seen. Full-size portraits hung in parlors and state rooms, built for public memory.
As Jay-Z put it, "I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, man." The known artists stamped themselves into history, preserving their face and signature. The unknown ones didn't get as lucky.
Some names were recorded because they mattered. When the sitter is unnamed, it says just as much: someone paid for the portrait, but not enough value was placed on the person's name to preserve it.
The ratio skews male. That tells you less about population and more about who portrait culture considered worth recording. Unless you were the wife of a man who mattered, of course.