Meet Your Neighbors: New England Portraits, Painters, & Society, 1790-1850Portraits have an immediacy which makes them compelling windows on the past. As images, they provide tangible information about their subjects and the world in which they lived. As art and cultural artifacts they reveal the dynamic social, aesthetic, and economic forces that shaped them. This book uses portraiture as a prism through which to look at rural New England society. In those years industrialization, immigration, and urbanization undermined