“John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, and Gilbert Stuart are the painters who chronicled our rise as a nation and as a republic,” commented Michael Maglaras. “In this new film we celebrate their legacy and the inspiration we still derive from their glorious work. These are the painters of resistance, rebellion, and revolution” 

Copley (1738-1815) shows us the faces of Americans reaching the boiling point. Trumbull (1756-1843) is the master painter of both the scenes of battle and the scenes of surrender, as we brought the British Empire to its knees at Saratoga and Yorktown. Peale (1741-1827) is the great artistic entrepreneur of the Revolution. Stuart (1755-1828) is the great painterly poet of the people who created America…portraying with truth, with grace, and with humanity our iconography…the faces that became what we now understand to be our “founding mothers and fathers.”

“These painters were, in the case of Peale and Trumbull, men of action, who smelled gunpowder in the heat of battle as serving soldiers,” said Maglaras. “With Copley we see a man torn between his American roots and the safety of his family. With Gilbert Stuart, we see a singular artistic figure avoiding the conflict for almost two decades, until he gives us, with his iconic portraits of George Washington and others, our first sense of ourselves as a nation.”