Publications

The Killing of Jane McCrea

Westholme Publishing, 2025

The killing of Jane McCrea on July 26, 1777, on the outskirts of a village in the northern Hudson Valley, would unexpectedly rupture the British advance from Canada that was meant to crush the American Revolution in one knockout blow. On that day, twenty-five-year-old McCrea, an unremarkable person preparing for an impending marriage, was assaulted, scalped, and killed by a group of Native Americans in the employ of British general John Burgoyne. Though the murder was but one of many civilian deaths in a fierce war zone, McCrea’s killing had far-reaching consequences for each of the three major parties involved in the Northern Campaign of 1777. In America, she became the great cause célèbre of the Revolution, the sympathetic female victim of the war symbolizing the righteousness of The Cause.

Paul Staiti’s “The Killing of Jane McCrea” is a masterly, often gripping account of the horrific incident and its long aftermath. McCrea is barely known today, but for a century following her murder, Mr. Staiti notes, every American knew her name. —Wall Street Journal

Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes

Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016

This is the story of five great American artists – Charles Willson Peale, John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart – who lived and worked through an era of breathtaking historical change. Some were ardent patriots, some British sympathizers. Some had their careers made by the Revolution, others had theirs disrupted.

Staiti's book will immediately become the authoritative account on the art of the American Revolution, and also the first successful attempt to explain why those faces and figures come down to us with such an iconic sheen. —Joseph Ellis, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution

John Singleton Copley in America

Yale University Press, 1995

Accompanies the milestone exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Co-authored with Carrie Rebora.

A lavish, illustrated volume published to accompany an exhibition of Copley's work... The focus is on the paintings, miniatures, and pastels that Copley, the supreme portraitist of the colonial era. —Booknews

Samuel F. B. Morse

Cambridge University Press

The definitive study of one of America's major artists and inventors. It covers his prodigious achievements in painting and technology, his passionate cultural ambitions, and his key role in the historic development of American art. The book imaginatively combines intellectual biography with interpretation of more than one hundred pictures.

Jilted: Samuel F. B. Morse at Art’s End

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 10.1 (Summer, 2024)

Samuel F. B. Morse’s bitter lament over an art career dead and gone did not arrive until 1849, more than a decade after he had painted his last picture. It came at precisely the same moment he was hearing thunderous applause for inventing an electromagnetic telegraph that had done nothing less than obliterate space and time. Yet, in that cacophony of fame, the memory of a lost art career haunted him like a photo from the wreckage of an old collision.

The Americans

Essay

Visitors to Versailles, an exhibition and book organized jointly by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Chateau de Versailles, turns the spotlight on those visitors who came from around the world from the late 17th century to the French Revolution. With portraits and sculptures, Court attire, travel guides, tapestries, Sevres and Meissen porcelain, display weapons and snuffboxes, the exhibition reveals what visitors discovered upon arriving at Versailles, the sort of welcome awaiting them, what they saw and their impressions, the gifts or memories they left with.

October 24, 2017 - February 25 2018, Palace of Versailles;
April 9 - July 29 2018, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A Surprising Influence on Obama’s Portrait

Op-Ed column, The Washington Post, February 12, 2018

It comes as a surprise — or perhaps no surprise — that his portrait of Obama is a riff on George P.A. Healy's portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

How Presidents Use their Portraits to Shape their Legacy

Op-Ed column, The Washington Post, January 17, 2017

Every executive since Washington has recognized the branding power of the painting.

Gilbert Stuart’s Presidential Imaginary

Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early America

Shaping the Body Politic: Art and Political Formation in Early America ranges in topic from national politics to the politics of national identity, and from presidential portraits to the architectures of the ordinary. Paul Staiti, Maurie McInnis, and Roger Stein offer new readings of canonical presidential images and spaces: Gilbert Stuart’s Lansdowne portrait of Washington, Jean-Antoine Houdon’s George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.

Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics

American Art, 2001

Homer’s late pictures possess a fatalistic outlook so ferocious and truthful that no other American artist can be placed in his company. This is an essay that examines the savagery of pictures like The Gulf Stream and The Fox Hunt by setting them in late nineteenth century notions of nature as a machine, uncaring, blind, and godless.

The Capitalist Portrait

Picturing Power: Portraiture and Its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce

Picturing Power: Portraiture and Its Uses in the New York Chamber of Commerce features almost three hundred portraits that once composed the New York Chamber of Commerce's renowned collection. Together they capture the giants of American business with aesthetic purpose and symbolic power. The images of civic leaders and entrepreneurs, carefully assembled over two hundred years, tell the story of American industry as shaped and reflected in the life of a major institution.

There is fascinating material here for readers of many interests: history, biography, business, architecture, and art. In our age of Occupy Wall Street, and its issues of money and power, this book couldn't be more timely. —John Wilmerding

American Artists and the July Revolution

American Artists and the Louvre

American Artists and the Louvre explores the origins of the artistic exchanges between France and the United States from the 18th century onward, and sheds new light on the museum's long-time role as an academy for artists from America. Accompanies the exhibition at the Musée du Louvre.

Con Artists: Harnett, Haberle, and their American Accomplices

Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil

Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe l’Oeil investigates the art of trompe l'oeil in more than 100 European and American paintings ranging in date from the 15th through the 20th centuries. Five enlightening essays by experts in European and American art and the science of seeing examine the phenomenon and persistence of trompe l'oeil over the centuries. Accompanies the exhibition organized by the National Gallery of Art.

The State of American Art

Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France

Published on the occasion of the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France explores the cultural politics and special relationship between France and America through paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings, documents, furniture, and decorative arts. Accompanies the exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Illusionism, Trompe l’Oeil, and the Perils of Viewership

Amon Carter Museum 1992

William Michael Harnett became the great American master of trompe-l'oeil still-life painting. His works, popular with the public long before they were appreciated by the art critics, "fool the eye" with their convincing, sharp-edged definition of form and careful rendering of materials. This volume provides the first thorough examination of Harnett's career and its significance for the history of American art. Accompanies the exhibition organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Publications

Essays