"On the evening of 24-25 August 1814, British forces under Admiral George Cockburn and General Robert Ross invaded Washington D.C., burned the Capitol, and destroyed some splendid state portraits of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, the French monarchy's gift to the American Congress some thirty years earlier. To mark the bicentennial of this event, art historians from universities and museums in the United States and Canada, France and Germany, gathered at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery on 25-26 September 2014 and engaged in a broad discussion of how royal, republican, and imperial heads of state and diplomats were represented in a manner that would promote their authority or mission with potential allies; how national, state, and provincial delegates were portrayed in a way that suggested the values of a faction, constituency, or class; and how prominent merchants, families, and their retainers were rendered to encapsulate new roles as responsible citizens. Our hypothesis was that between the War of Independence of 1776 and the War of 1812 the United States maintained a complicated and tense political relationship with Britain and France, which had an impact on patterns of trade and diplomacy, cultural representation and consumption on both sides of the Atlantic. The transition from monarchical to republican forms of government was accompanied by a shift from aristocrats to citizens as the primary patrons, artists, subjects, and viewers of portraits, and for this reason images of heads of state, delegates, and families often reveal an uneasy integration of old aristocratic forms and new republican values. Five thematic introducers and fourteen essayists illuminate the challenges at play in the creation of viable political identities in the modern era"--Provided by publisher.