Explore the Description and analysis of this artwork.
Election Day in Philadelphia is a genre painting of a "bustling streetscape" on Chestnut Street outside Independence Hall. Highlights include a parade towing an election float shaped like a longboat, a man pasting flyers on a wall, a brawl spilling out of a tavern, a drunk sprawled in the gutter, children and dogs playing in the street, and many groups of men and women in animated discussion. The crowd is a mix of upper-class folk and laborers, including at least three African Americans. The figures are crisply rendered in great detail given the painting's relatively small size. Despite this "raucous tableaux" that echoes William Hogarth's satirical election series (1754–55), the flying of three American flags outside a landmark of American independence "legitimize[s] popular democracy ... by tying it to the patriotic ferment of the American Revolution."In 1834, William Dunlap characterized Election Day as "filled with miniature portraits of the well-known electioneering politicians of the day." Ross Barrett has criticized this "misreading" that "elided the democratic crowd at the picture’s center" and reflected the "politicized foci and blind spots that republican aesthetics inscribed into the visual field of early American art." Edgar P. Richardson called the painting one of the "most important views of American civic life that we have from the early Republic."
longboat American flags William Dunlap Edgar P. Richardson Philadelphia genre painting election series American Revolution early Republic William Hogarth Independence Hall Chestnut Street