continued, "whatever we do of our own free motion, a dead man's icy hand obstructs us." In writing about the contexts of American eighteenth-century portraiture, Breen speaks of the drive toward "self-fashioning" that is often behind such activities as commissioning portraits. In this business "eighteenth-century men and women in conversation with artists . . . decided how they wanted to present themselves on canvas."1 By studying the self-fashioning involved in this "creative exchange", Breen speculates that one can discern the "cultural meanings" that the colonists attached to various aspects of the process of being painted. In a broader sense, Hawthorne's question about freeing the nation from the past can also be answered by a comparison of the cultural meanings that West and Eakins and their sitters shared as they took part in the general self-fashioning work of American society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The two works that will be compared are West's Jane Galloway which was painted around 1757, and is at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and Eakins' Miss Van Buren which was painted around 1891 and is at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The dating is not certain on either painting because the sitters were friends and the portraits were done while the painters were working on numerous other projects. Thus no papers exist detailing contracts for the commissions or details of that type.2 Both works were done in Philadelphia. West's was painted approximately three years before his departure for Italy and Eakins' was painted approximately five years after he had left the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts "after a sharp debate over using the nude male model in women's classes."3 Thus the work by West came before his full exposure to European painting and the Eakins example is the work of a mature painter at the height of his powers.
The relative aesthetic...