Art inspired people during the American Revolutionary era by producing emotional responses while creating memorable messages.

Think of something well-known like Paul Revere’s “Boston Massacre” print, which shows British soldiers shooting guns, firing squad-style, into an unarmed crowd. That’s not how the event really happened, but it’s how people at the time remembered it because that image was seared into the mind’s eye.

What we now call the Revolution was fought not only in the colonies with muskets and bayonets, but by artists on both sides of the Atlantic. Armed with paint, canvas and wax, some artists played an integral role in forging revolutionary ideals, a story told in “The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution.”

Author Zara Anishanslin, an associate professor of history and art history at the University of Delaware, will discuss the book on Dec. 4 at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. “The art discussed in ‘The Painter’s Fire’ had similar effects of inspiring emotion, sending political messages and creating common memories,” she says. “Art was a powerful political tool then, just as it was before and has been since.”

A historian who likes to go beyond single national borders to tell transatlantic histories, Anishanslin researched the book in locations throughout Europe as well as the United States. Uncovering the interconnected histories of the three artists at the heart of the book took her back and forth across the Atlantic, and included the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon and the British Library. “I’m a historian who uses objects to tell stories about the past,” she says. “I also researched in museum collections, historic sites, and historical collections on both sides of the Atlantic, including places as different from one another as the Nantucket Historical Association and Westminster Abbey.”

A surprising amount of anti-monarchical art was being made and displayed on both sides of the Atlantic during this era. The “American war,” as it was called in Britain, was never universally popular in Britain, just as many Loyalists in North America chose not to support the fight for independence. “The popularity of anti-monarchical art on both sides of the Atlantic reminds us that the American Revolution was also a civil war,” says Anishanslin.

These patriot artists operated from within London and Paris to shape a new political culture, as well as within the colonies and later the new nation. American-born wax sculptor Patience Wright operated a popular London wax museum and was a staunch American patriot who used her art to inspire revolution.

Before the war, she enjoyed royal and aristocratic patronage. When she learned about the Battle of Lexington and Concord, she allegedly marched up to King George III, whose wax portrait she’d made more than once, and berated him for killing his subjects.

To no one’s surprise, she lost her royal patronage.

Wright also added the figure of an Indigenous American chief and his wife to her wax museum as a statement about her attachment to America. She installed a tableau of Biblical heroine Esther saving her people from a king deluded by an evil minister, a clear parallel to what colonists thought was happening in the lead up to the war. During the war, she helped inspire revolution on both sides of the Atlantic by using her art as a tool of international espionage.

She created wax heads of people like the Earl of Chatham, a British politician popular in the colonies for his relatively pro-American stance, then shipped them to her sister Rachel, who operated a wax museum in Philadelphia frequented by members of Congress. “Before the heads were put on display to send their own political messages, Rachel gave the letters Wright had hidden within them detailing things like political gossip and British troop movements to people like John Adams,” Anishanslin says. “Patience Wright’s art inspired revolution both in terms of visual messages and as tools of espionage.”

In 1780, a jury for London’s Royal Academy of Art chose the debut painting entry by 22-year-old Joseph Wright, a promising, award-winning Royal Academy student notable for being one of the first Americans to study there, to be among the hundreds of paintings on display. His painting showed his famous mother, Patience Wright, modelling a wax head on her lap. And not just any head, but the decapitated head of King Charles I, England’s king famously beheaded by his own subjects during the English Civil War.

Looking on were busts of King George III and Queen Charlotte, who also happened to be at the exhibition. It was, as everyone who saw it knew, a portrait of regicide and created a sensation. “Imagine the bold defiance that fueled this young American artist,” she says. “Imagine being willing to display such a painting where he knew the king and queen would see it.”

At that point, it was five years into the armed conflict between Britain and America, and yet, reactions to the portrait varied widely.

“Although some people in Britain called it an insult to decency, even treasonous, others saluted it, publicly even, in newspapers as an entertaining defense of constitutional liberties,” says Anishanslin. “The clashing opinions and its remarkable presence at London’s Royal Academy at all remind us that the war we now call the American Revolution was fought on both sides of the Atlantic by artists as well as soldiers, and in the courts of public opinion as well as on the battlefield.”

The book talk, “The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution” with Zara Anishanslin, will be held on Thursday, Dec. 4 at noon, at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. The event will be live streamed on VMHC”s YouTube and Facebook pages. In person tickets