Excerpt from Of Arms and Artists by Paul Staiti, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The striking images they made—of the Declaration of Independence; the battles at Bunker's Hill, Quebec, Princeton, and Trenton; the peace brokered in Paris; and portraits of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and others—illuminated the era. Because the United States quickly arose from a popular uprising, it was at first unformed and inchoate, and thus in urgent need of images, rituals, and mythologies not only that could replace the old British ones, but that might also bring a disparate population together as a functional union.

For most Americans, the notion of national citizenship was inherently incompatible with the cherished local identities by which they had been defining themselves for generations; each new state was, to some degree, a nation unto itself. While Americans might have comprehended the significance of independence from Britain, they did not necessarily grasp the full magnitude and enduring consequences of their newly acquired nationhood. John Adams articulated the situation with typical acuity:

The colonies had grown up under constitutions of government so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of actions, was certainly a difficult enterprise.

Getting "thirteen clocks to strike together," he added, would be an achievement that "no artist had ever before effected."

To be sure, helping Americans unite across region and culture were the shared rights and laws ultimately articulated in the Constitution, as well as political tracts and philosophical essays that made the case for the republic. But in order to bind together as a union, and not just a weak confederation of independent states, Americans required a cultural understanding of their mutual identity. In such a perplexing and grave situation, persuasive images—of historic events, transcendent heroes, and honored martyrs—could be essential building blocks in the creation of nationhood because they provided a common vision of America for Americans who were far more likely to say who they were not than to embrace who they needed to be. If the United States was to cohere at zero hour, at a time when consensus was nearly impossible, raw republican citizens, reckoning with a newfound identity, needed compelling images that could take hold of their imagination, shape their thinking, and channel their energies.

Indeed, even today our collective understanding of what America's origins look like is still largely dependent on these five artists and their images. Stuart's portrait of Washington, as an example of durability and reach, has been reproduced more times than any other image in history. Besides the hundred or so that he painted himself and the thousands more—copies, prints, and copies of prints—that subsequently saturated American culture, Stuart's portrait has adorned tens of trillions of one-dollar bills since 1869. A full-length, life-size version of his Washington was first hung in the White House in 1800, and each President from John Adams onward has had to measure his own tenure in office against its withering gaze. Even more symbolically, Trumbull's large-scale Revolutionary War pictures, installed under the great dome of the United States Capitol Rotunda, have stood for two centuries as silent witnesses to the most august ceremonies of state and as ancestral sentinels connecting legislators and citizens to America's origins.

The lives of these five artists were as colorful and exceptional as their paintings. Peale, who started life as a Maryland saddle-maker, wielded both a musket and a brush during the war. After the Revolution, he painted more than a hundred portraits of the worthies of his time, eventually installing them in a hundred-foot-long gallery inside Independence Hall. West, born into a Pennsylvania Quaker family, moved to London in 1760 where he became the official historical painter to King George III. An American Patriot at heart, West had to carefully navigate his way through wartime England, waiting for the day that he could express his American sentiments in words and pictures. John Singleton Copley, the greatest painter in colonial America, so craved political neutrality that he left Boston for London in 1774, where he made a spectacular debut into the British art world. At the end of the Revolution, he dropped his self-imposed rule of avoiding politics when he painted portraits of three American Patriots, including John Adams on an impressive scale. John Trumbull, son of the colonial governor of Connecticut, served as General Washington's aide-de-camp early in the war. After the Revolution, he painted some of the most stirring events from the war: the battles at Bunker's Hill, Quebec, Trenton, and Princeton, and then, while living with Thomas Jefferson in Paris, he began work on his magnum opus, a painting of the Declaration of Independence. He served in Washington's diplomatic corps during the 1790s and afterward was hired by Congress to paint four colossal pictures of the Revolution, which continue to hang in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol. Stuart, born into a penniless Rhode Island family, was the most talented of them all, but also a profligate perpetually courting disaster. He painted just about every person who held power, or who wanted to. A man who never expressed a political allegiance, Stuart was nonetheless responsible for the most memorable and enduring portraits of the Founders.

Excerpted from Of Arms and Artists by Paul Staiti. Copyright © 2016 by Paul Staiti. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury USA. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.