Image: Arthur Ross Gallery, University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
The Arthur Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania will open ‘At Liberty: Life in the City of Brotherly Love During the Early Republic’ on August 28, presenting an exhibition that traces how visual culture helped shape ideas of Philadelphia in the decades before and after the founding of the United States. The show runs through December 13, 2026, and brings together 41 works from several institutions, including the Penn Art Collection, Pennsylvania Hospital, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Winterthur Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
According to the gallery, the exhibition asks visitors to consider the role of paintings, prints, drawings, and sculpture in forming collective conceptions of the city and its residents, including Benjamin Franklin, described in the gallery material as America’s first international celebrity. The display combines portraits of prominent figures with scenes of everyday life in Philadelphia, aiming to show how the city was imagined during the early republic and how those images continue to shape its memory.
The works on view include a recently restored portrait of British abolitionist Samuel Romilly by Gilbert Stuart, which hung for many years in Penn’s Houston Hall. Two rarely seen works by Benjamin West, an American-born, English-trained painter, have also undergone conservation in preparation for the exhibition. A suite of drawings by John Lewis Krimmel showing street scenes from around 1813 is presented alongside selected plates from William Birch’s ‘Views of Philadelphia,’ published a decade earlier.
Other highlights include portraits of Benjamin Franklin by artists active in the Revolutionary era, among them Charles Willson Peale, and works by three members of Philadelphia’s Peale family. The exhibition also includes images made for later national anniversaries, from the commemoration of America’s 150th in 1926 to the present, extending the historical frame beyond the 18th and 19th centuries and into the way Philadelphia has been revisited in successive moments of remembrance.
‘At Liberty’ is curated by Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, the Arthur Ross Gallery’s inaugural faculty director and the James and Nan Farquhar Professor of the History of Art at Penn. The gallery says the exhibition is supported by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art and the Philadelphia Cultural Fund. It also incorporates student-created videos from Drexel University’s Digital Peale Project, which use digital visualization tools and artificial intelligence to offer a contemporary response to the historical material.
The exhibition is accompanied by a slate of free public programs. An opening celebration is scheduled for September 9 from 5 to 7 pm, with remarks from Shaw and Emma Hart, professor of history and director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, along with themed refreshments and a live performance by the Penn Shabbatones. Penn student guides will offer tours on most Saturdays and Sundays from noon to 3 pm, and Wednesdays from 4 to 6 pm, throughout the run.
Additional events include an online Penn Lifelong Learning lecture on November 11 at noon with Shaw and Lynn Smith Dolby, director of the Penn Art Collection; an artist talk with Philadelphia-based artist Eileen Neff on October 22; and a curators’ conversation on November 14 featuring Shaw, Jill Vaum Rothschild, and Sylvia Yount. The gallery lists its exhibition hours as Monday through Thursday from 11 am to 6 pm and Friday through Sunday from noon to 5 pm.
