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Hello,
    I'm a professor of American history, and I thought someone on the list =
might
be able to help me locate a set of four paintings which depict the classical
republican stages of history - that is the rise and fall from agrarian
simplicity to civic virtue to imperial corruption to social disintegration. =
 I
believe this artist was an American, but he may have been a European =
patronized
by Americans in the early nineteenth century.  Trouble for me is that I can =
not
seem to recall where I saw this set, or any details relating to their
production.  I associated them immediately with the ideology of the American
revolution, because I'm an American historian, but it's possible that they =
were
produced during the Italian Renaissance.  If I could have clues as to the
artists name, or of course the names of the paintings... I'd be grateful.

Patrick Ryan
University of Texas at Dallas