Toward a Meeting of the Minds.

In 1870 the Boston, Massachusetts-based firm of Louis Prang and Company, one of the leading dealers of chromolithography, published a portrait of Hiram R. Revels, the newly admitted senator from Mississippi, based on an oil painting by the German-immigrant artist and Union army veteran Theodore Kaufmann. Historians and art historians have reached out to one another's work for each discipline's distinctive resources and perspectives, but for the most part each then retreats back to its respective favored intellectual turf, its favored approaches and purview, an independence that ultimately confines historical understanding.