America 250 is certainly on our minds and we have a great line-up of speakers on Anglo-American Art - Paul Staiti, Professor at Mount Holyoke College, and author of Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters' Eyes; Adam Chen of Harvard University and co-curator of ‘Life and Liberty: American Painters and the 'Revolution' in Art, 1770-90’ which opens at Tate Britain in June; and Anna Reynolds, Surveyor of The King's Pictures at the Royal Collection Trust. Moderated by Thomas Ardill, curator of paintings, prints and drawings at the London Museum.
The panel is part of Talks Thursday at the Society of Antiquaries.
One exhibition entirely dedicated to the theme will be 'One People, Two Shores: Anglo-American Art in the Age of Revolution' at Ben Elwes Fine Art.
Speakers:
Paul J. Staiti, Alumnae Foundation Professor of Fine Arts at Mount Holyoke College, is the author of books and essays on John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Samuel F. B. Morse, William Michael Harnett, and Winslow Homer. He has lectured at the Louvre, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and has been the recipient of senior fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities three times. He teaches courses on American art and architecture, as well as American cinema. In 2009 he was honored with Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teacher award.
Anna Reynolds is Surveyor of The King’s Pictures at Royal Collection Trust, where she oversees the curatorial, conservation and art-handling departments responsible for oil paintings, watercolours, prints, drawings and photographs. Anna has worked at Royal Collection Trust since 2008. Anna’s experience combines twenty years of art history with a background in business strategy and a degree in psychology. She completed her Master’s degree in Dress History at the Courtauld Institute, and her research has continued to explore the relationship between Western portraiture and material culture during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. In 2017 Anna was awarded the Polaire Weissman fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where she studied the role of fashion in the paintings of John Singer Sargent. Her exhibitions and associated publications include In Fine Style: The Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion (2013), Portrait of the Artist (2016) and Style and Society: Dressing the Georgians (2023).
Adam Chen is an art historian and curator with a focus on British and American art of the late-18th and early-19th centuries. His projects include ‘Life and Liberty: American Painters and the 'Revolution' in Art, 1770-90’ (June 2026 – June 2027) at Tate Britain, a show examining the history paintings of the Anglo-American artists Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. Adam graduated summa cum laude with a BA and MA from Yale University and is currently pursuing a doctorate in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard.
Thomas Ardill was recently made curator of London, 1700-1815 at London Museum, having been curator of paintings, prints and drawings since 2016. He previously worked at Tate Britain where he catalogued the Scottish sketchbooks and drawings in the JMW Turner Bequest and curated several displays in the Clore Gallery. He curated of A World of Care: Turner and the Environment at Turner’s House in 2024, and has published widely on the artist, most recently a survey of ecocritical scholarship in Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals (Tate Publishing, 2025). He holds an MA and PhD from the Courtauld Institute, and his thesis examined religious painting in Britain, 1800-1832, including the work of Benjamin West and his followers.
Exhibition:
One people, Two Shores: Anglo-American Art in the Age of Revolution
22 June – 11 September 2026
“Our geniuses all go to Europe. In England, at present, the best history painter, West; the best portrait painter, Copley; and the best landscape painter, Taylor, at Bath, are all Americans.”
Benjamin Franklin
16 May 1783
Marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Ben Elwes Fine Art takes a visually rich and historically significant look at the Anglo-American artists who enriched London in the eighteenth century. “One People, Two Shores: Anglo-American Art in the Age of Revolution” brings together works on canvas and paper by Benjamin West (1738-1820), John Singleton Copley (1738-1815), and John Taylor (1735-1806), three artists singled out by Benjamin Franklin as the best in England in their respective genres: history, portraiture, and landscape. Amongst the additional works which complement the exhibition are an eighteenth-century portrait by the leading artist of New Orleans, Jose Francisco de Salazar y Mendosa (1750-1802), Robert Smirke’s study for an engraving that appeared in Joel Barlow’s epic poem, The Columbiad, and the terracotta maquette by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904) for Liberty Enlightening the World.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is a newly available painting by Taylor that is the single most outstanding landscape by an American in the eighteenth century, and one of the best in Britain. The Philadelphia-born Taylor painted his large River Landscape with the Ruins of an Abbey in 1792, after his move to London from Bath, where he had been a friend and neighbour of Thomas Gainsborough. It is a culminating work. There is a spectacular silvery effect in the delicate foliage that is being teased by a breeze that gives the picture a sense of real time. The ruined abbey evokes twelfth-century Tintern on the River Wye in Wales, a subject being painted by J. M. W. Turner at the same time. Taylor’s work was added to the collections of George III and George IV, praised by David Garrick, and extolled by the Scottish novelist, Tobias Smollett, who considered him “the best landscape-painter now living.”
The exhibition takes place at Ben Elwes Fine Art, 45 Maddox Street, London, W1S 2PE
Opening hours during Classic Art London: Monday to Friday, 9:30am-5:30pm, Saturday to Sunday, 10am-4pm