Seeing the self “in frame”: early new england material practice and puritan piety

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Abstract
I offer here a set of observations about the use of pictures in the Puritan devotional practice of self-examination. Specifically, I consider a cluster of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century gravestone carvings and one oil painting, the Thomas Smith Self-Portrait (c.1670–91). Both kinds of artifacts, on stone and canvas, might well be described as means of “framing” the godly self. If Puritan diaries and journals, elegies and meditative poetry, biographies and autobiographies are literatures of and about the self, the gravestones and portrait painting that constitute my subject facilitate the performance of similar introspective labor. The fact that Thomas Smith likely painted his own resemblance while looking in a mirror represents only the most literal assertion of relations between his picture and the Puritan piety of self-examination. In approaching these material objects as “technologies of the self” (to appropriate a phrasing pursued by Tom Webster with respect to diaries), I also resituate th...