Dunlap, William (1766-1839)

US painter, playwright, and theatre manager. After beginning as a painter and a writer of Gothic romances, he moved into the theatre, writing and adapting plays. He also owned and managed the John Street and Park Theaters in New York City.

He was born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. As a painter, he went to London to study with Benjamin West, and, on his return, he wrote such Gothic romances as The Father (1789) and Fountainville Abbey (1795). He was then attracted to the theatre, and in the ensuing decades he wrote or adapted some 56 plays, about half of which were translations or adaptations of Continental writers. As proprietor and manager of the New York theatres, he produced many of his own plays, including Andre (1798). He worked to get the government to support the theatre to help lift it from its commercialism and he tried to encourage indigenous American plays and actors over the prevailing Anglophile snobbery. For his many contributions, he would later become known as ‘the father of American drama’. However, when his theatre work led to bankruptcy, he returned to painting. He gained a reputation with his portraits but he maintained his romantic approach in works such as Count of Death (1818). He also wrote several histories and biographies including the Life of Charles Brockden Brown (1815) and History of the American Theatre (1832). He was one of the founders of the National Academy of Design (1826) and wrote History of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834).