Exploring the history of North American pastels | Penn Today
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Megan Baker is a Barra Foundation Fellow in Art and Material Culture at Penn’s
McNeil Center for Early American Studies
, and a Ph.D. candidate in art history at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation, “Crayon Rebellion: The Material Politics of North American Pastels, 1758–1814,” examines how the fragile pastel medium thrived as a documentary tool across North America during the age of Atlantic revolutions amid political instability and material scarcity.
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Megan Baker is a Barra Foundation Fellow in Art and Material Culture at Penn’s McNeil Center.
(Image: Courtesy of McNeil Center for Early American Studies)
As the child of a historical archaeologist, “I grew up scraping my trowel through the soil of a late 17th-century English settler complex,” Baker says. In her current research, she says “I find myself circling back to questions first raised in archaeology pits: How do we reconstruct a fragmented past? And what do materials left behind reveal about the human hands that made them and the worlds they inhabited?”
Her interest in her dissertation topic started when she was a museum intern. “I noticed an unusual number of pastel portraits made in 18th-century North America,” she says. “Since the pastel technique was primarily associated with French artists, I was struck by a curious anomaly: Why and how did this ‘French’ medium gain such traction in the British American provinces during a moment of mounting political discord? As I dug deeper, I developed more questions about art’s place in the story of the American Revolution. For instance, the Stamp Act of 1765 explicitly taxed art supplies including paper and pigment—both essential for making pastels—yet art historians had not explored the era’s taxation through the lens of art-making.”
“My dissertation investigates this pastel boom by tracing the material transit of supplies across the Atlantic and examining how artists adapted by sourcing local pigments,” she says. “I look at how they deployed the medium in projects of civil and natural history, used portraiture to consolidate kinship networks, and documented the evolving political elite of the new United States.”
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