Since the appearance of Michael Warner's seminal Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America in 1990, discussions of early American culture have been dominated by a focus on print and its various social and ideological manifestations. Thus although a number of critics, such as Christopher Looby and Sandra Gustafson, have succeeded in tempering this preoccupation with print through an emphasis on the oral culture of the new nation, there are many facets of the young republic which remain overshadowed and understudied. In this respect, then, Wendy Bellion's generously illustrated and fluently written book stands alongside other recent accounts of early national visual culture, like Laura Rigal's The American Manufactory: Art, Labor, and the World of Things in the Early Republic (1998) and Alexander Nemerov's The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812–1824 (2001), as part of a small but striking body of scholarship that points out new directions in the field. Taking the fledgling nation's “material culture of optical pleasure, play, and deceit” (4) as her central subject, Bellion surveys a fascinating range of artifacts, from quasi-scientific devices like the camera obscura and the phantasmagoria to trompe l'oeil paintings like Charles Willson Peale's Staircase Group (1795) and Samuel Lewis's A Deception (1805), in order to argue that the concept of “illusion was implicated in larger dilemmas of authority, knowledge, and identity” (16) during the post-Revolutionary period. Pictorial tricks, Bellion compellingly suggests, trained their viewers in the art of discernment, a perceptual faculty which was prized as a marker of virtuous citizenship. These illusions helped to expose, and were also sometimes ambiguously complicit in, “a world that seemed to be awash with forgers, counterfeiters, plagiarists, conspirators, imposters and demagogues” (15).

Besides persuasively reframing the late eighteenth century as “an era in which the senses were politicized as agents of knowledge and action” (5), one of the most impressive things about Citizen Spectator is its attention to the physical dimension of the works being discussed. Bellion is acutely sensitive not only to the spaces within images but also beyond them. Thus she repeatedly draws telling connections between the exhibition room and the “everyday places where perception was persistently represented as a mode of discernment – including the statehouse, the market and the street” (7). Chapter 3, for instance, transforms our understanding of William and Thomas Birch's Philadelphia Views (1800) by treating it as a “record of how the city was looked at rather than as a document of what the city looked like” (120), within which subtle distortions of scale and perspective suggest “the presence of an artist's body and his emplacement within a material environment” (121). Equally, too, Bellion offers shrewd readings of how pictorial illusionism, and its interplay between surface and depth and presence and absence, positions the viewer in particular ways. The identity and response of the early national viewer remains largely “a matter of speculation” (105), Bellion admits, and on the whole her speculations about the concrete effects of trompe l'oeil are convincing. But I was less satisfied with some of the more abstract effects she attributes to her chosen objects. Perhaps most problematically, Bellion claims that the work of artists like Peale and Lewis had the result of “uniting Americans separated by language, distance, ethnicity and custom in a shared inquiry about the possibilities and limitations of looking” (5). Yet there is a lingering tension throughout the book between this assertion and the acknowledgment that such images “could involve early national Americans in vastly different ways of looking” (40).

The sense of imagined community which Bellion attributes to the viewing of pictorial illusionism is, in short, thinly substantiated. She nicely delineates the transnational dimension of this artistic tradition. The relationship of Peale to his European antecedents, and the Birches’ rejection of the “meandering spaces” (146) of the British picturesque for the rational logic of the Philadelphian grid are, for example, very effectively covered. But the unity of the audience for their images remains open to question. Indeed, the fullest accounts of spectatorial responses offered here suggest a divided public. Chapter 2, for instance, lucidly connects debates over the perceived elitism of the 1795 Columbianum exhibition to the bitterly partisan conflict between the Federalists and Republicans, while chapter 5 makes a strong case that the Invisible Lady, a popular mechanical device that seemed to speak with a female voice, helped its male visitors to reinforce gender boundaries. It is only in the final chapter, which hinges on Rembrandt Peale's filiopietistic portraits of George Washington from the 1820s, that a patently nationalistic strain of illusionism becomes evident, and Bellion herself positions this new variation on the form as running counter to the art of discernment. A painting like Patriae Pater (1824), she argues, “marks the rise of visual fantasy as a mode of illusion in the United States over trompe l'oeil's characteristic operations of undeceiving” (327). Ultimately, Citizen Spectator gives us a brilliant reconstruction of pictorial trickery in post-Revolutionary Philadelphia (its avowed focal point), but lacks the regional breadth to truly clinch its claim of “a viewership that was national in scope if wholly virtual in form” (236). Still, we should take this limitation as a sign of the valuable work which remains to be done on the visual culture of the new republic, and on its relation to wider issues of citizenship and subjectivity; work which would do well to build on Bellion's many penetrating insights.