The Émigré and the General: Denis Volozan's Portrait of George Washington in an Atlantic Context

Abstract

In 1802, the French painter Denis Volozan (1765–1820) completed a posthumous portrait of George Washington commissioned by the legislature of Delaware for its State House in Dover. A recent immigrant to the United States, the artist had relocated to Philadelphia from the island of Saint-Domingue at the height of the Haitian Revolution. Once it was unveiled, however, the painting provoked widespread public dislike. Hidden from view, it was barely saved from destruction in the 1960s. Though the choice to entrust Volozan with such a project may have seemed like poor judgment to contemporary audiences, this article argues that his portrait illustrates the symbolic reinterpretation of Washington by transatlantic French diasporas in North America and the Caribbean, of which the painter was a part. Volozan was familiar with depictions of both European elites and figures of power like Toussaint Louverture, whom he had sketched in 1800. As such, his approach to American political portraiture was a result of greater dynamics of circulation in the Atlantic world. Celebrating a patriotic figure, his Delaware picture was nonetheless shaped by the political and cultural interactions between France, Britain, and the United States at the turn of the nineteenth century.