A lavishly illustrated catalog of portraits of Newport residents from the eighteenth century to the present.
Newport, Rhode Island, has always been a fabled American city. From 1639 when it was founded by religious dissidents from the Massachusetts Bay Colony until the Revolution, it was one of the five most important commercial centers in the colonies, aided, no doubt, by its unusual policy of religious toleration. Occupied and burned by the British during the war, Newport never regained its commercial importance, but by the end of the nineteenth century it had become the Gilded Age's most glamorous resort community and site of the grandest parties and summer houses of the national Social Register. Though much of the glamor has evaporated, it is still one of most visited summer resort locations.
In 1992, the Newport Art Museum assembled an exhibition of 223 portraits of Newporters painted over a period of three centuries. It presented not just a gallery of the Newport elite and some of its haute bourgeoisie, but also a showcase of the most famous portraitists and portrait styles throughout United States history. Artists represented in this collectionrange from the great colonial portraitists Gilbert Stuart, Robert Feke, and John Singleton Copley to such modern figures as Diego Rivera, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol.