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The Mason Children: David, Joanna, and Abigail, 1670�Attributed to the Freake-Gibbs Painter�Oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 42 3/4 in.

http://www.thinker.org/fam/education/publications/guide-american/01.html

THE MASON CHILDREN: DAVID, JOANNA, AND ABIGAIL Introduction

This is the oldest painting in the collection of American art at the de Young Museum; it was painted in 1670, just fifty years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock on the coast of Massachusetts. Paintings from the early decades of New England settlement are very rare and only about thirty-five dating before 1700 survive. This painting depicts three children of Arthur Mason (a wealthy Boston baker) and his wife, Joanna Mason.

Discussion

This portrait can offer us a firsthand glimpse into the lives of the Mason children and children in general during the early colonial period. The children look far older than their years, but we know their exact ages which are inscribed next to their heads. David in particular seems tall and unusually proportioned for an eight-year old, but all of the children have a stiff, erect bearing that modern viewers do not associate with childhood. North American Puritans were deeply concerned about children because they considered young people as repositories of the most basic human instincts; they believed that children might be wild or immoral if not disciplined by strict religious and cultural rules. The Puritans assigned as many adult duties as possible to children, and filled the children's remaining time with religious and educational activities. This view of children was a slightly extreme version of the general perception of childhood in European culture during this same period. The idea of childhood as a time apart from adult problems and interests did not develop until the mid-eighteenth century. Until then, childhood was not considered a distinct time in life separate from adulthood, and for this reason, children began to dress as adults as soon as they were six years of age.

The clothing the Mason children wear is based on typical clothing of the period but shows flourishes of extravagance associated with wealth in seventeenth century America. The abundance of laces and ribbons on the clothing of all three children would have been seen as a mark of privileged social status. Massachusetts law stated that only the very wealthy could display extravagant clothing; sleeve slashes, such as those seen in this painting, could only be worn by members of households whose income exceeded 200 pounds per year. Yet even the well-to-do, influenced by the predominantly Puritan and Quaker ethics of the time, often frowned upon overly fancy clothes as vain and impious. It was more common for wealthy people to wear simple clothes made of expensive fabric. One could argue that what the artist was depicting in this portrait was not the appearance of the Mason children at a specific moment in time, but the Mason children as their parents wanted them to be perceived: mature, well-provided-for, and important. The glimpse into the lives of the children portrayed in this picture belies the stereotype of Puritan childhood as dark and deprived. Not all of the residents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were as prosperous as the Masons seem to have been, but the high regard for their children that the Masons demonstrated by commissioning this picture was probably not unusual.

Looking Closely

People often think of portraits primarily as records of a person's appearance. A less obvious purpose of portraiture is to communicate other kinds of information about the sitter. While the artist has carefully differentiated between the faces of the three children, he has lavished most of his attention on the details of the children's clothing and the objects they hold. Each of the girls wears a red coral necklace which was believed to ward off childhood diseases. Joanna holds a fan, the kind of accessory a fashionable and wealthy young woman might carry on formal occasions. David holds a silver-topped cane and gloves--both emblems of maturity and social status beyond his years. Abigail holds a rose, a symbol of innocence. Symbols such as these can be interpreted by historians today, but a true understanding of the purposes and meaning of portraiture during this period is still incomplete (owing in part to the small number of portraits that still exist). Inscribed next to David's head is the phrase "Anno Dom 1670," which states in Latin the year the painting was completed.

Style

The stiff frontal poses in which the children are depicted and the shallow space in which they stand seem curious to contemporary viewers but was an accepted style of the time. Artists in colonial America received little formal education in art and were considered to be in the same social category as craftsmen. Most art from this period appears flat and two-dimensional because the artists did not have sufficient training in linear perspective. It was also the fashion not to smile in portraits.

Artist

The name of the artist is unknown. The term "Freake-Gibbs" painter is used because this work is thought to be painted by the same artist who painted portraits of members of the Freake and Gibbs families during the same period. There are two possible explanations for the anonymity of the Freake-Gibbs painter. First, there would have been no need for an artist to advertise his name on a work of art in a small community. (In the 1600s, Boston was a small community.) Second, at this time painters were regarded as the same type of workers as carpenters, potters, and silversmiths, who also did not sign their works.

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John and Elizabeth Freake with Baby Mary (1671)

http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/American/1963.135.html

These portraits of a wealthy Bostonian and his wife and daughter (the youngest of their eight children) are among the most important of the relatively small number that survive from the late seventeenth century in New England. A half-dozen portraits painted in Boston during the 1670s can be attributed to the same anonymous artist, who gave greater attention to costume than to the characterization of the individuals. The colonial painter's deliberate, decorative style shows his awareness of a tradition in British portraiture that derives ultimately from late sixteenth-century iconic representations of Elizabeth I.

Research on the sitters and technical examination of the portraits support a theory that the artist updated the Freakes' portraits in about 1674, shortly after he first painted them. It was then that the baby was added and details in costume were changed, probably to reflect current fashion. Similar items appear in both the portraits and a household inventory taken in 1675 following John Freake's death: a signet ring, a black coat, and gloves were among his possessions. Also listed were a set of twelve chairs with turkey-worked upholstery (one of which Mrs. Freake is seated upon) and yards of lemon-colored silk that could well have been used to make the child's dress. While little is revealed of the sitters' personalities in these portraits, their personal effects do denote the social and economic status of a prominent merchant and attorney and his family.

-SES

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Thomas Smith Self Portrait (1680)

Boston mariner, Capt. Thomas Smith: wearing fine French lace bunched at his throat (he is well off); the naval skirmish in the background must refer to some action in which he took part. He indicates that he accepts his impending death: holding a skull and with a poem about mortality beneath it:

Why why should I the World be minding

Therein a World of Evils Finding

Then Farewell World: Farewell thy Jarres

thy Joies thy toies thy Wiles thy Warres

Truth sounds Retreat: I am not sorye.

The Eternal Draws to him my heart

By Faith (which can thy Force Subvert)

To crowne me after Grace with Glory.

(Hughes, American Visions 35)

This painting is the only seventeenth-century New England portrait by an identified artist and the earliest extant American self-portrait. Few details are known about Smith, who was recorded as a portrait painter in a contemporary account book at Harvard College. A group of about four portraits of Bostonians painted between 1675 and 1690 can be attributed to Smith on the basis of style. That he was a man of wealth is confirmed by his inventory of 1691, as well as by his refined attire in the present portrait. A reference to Smith as a mariner, which appears in his will of 1688, is supported by the naval battle depicted in the vista to the left, which includes ships flying British and Dutch flags.

Among indications that Smith was acquainted with northern European portraiture are the modeling of rounded forms in this painting- especially the figure- and the illusion of real space. The skull and the poem- which bears the artist's initials at its conclusion- comment on the mortality of man, a theme recalling seventeenth-century Dutch and British precedents.

http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/American/1948.19.html

Thomas Smith

Self-Portrait, about 1680 Description

Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait is a half-length representation of a seated man facing three-quarters left. The man's gray hair is parted in the center and shoulder length. Long, individual strokes of gray and white are painted over broadly painted areas of gray and brown. The man's features are slightly stylized and sharply modeled. His blue eyes bulge under drooping eyelids and look directly at the viewer. The skin is wrinkled at the outer corner of the proper left eye and at the bridge of the nose. A light pink highlight runs the length of the nose and draws attention to its prominent size. The mouth is straight, and the upper lip has a gray shadow that extends into the creases around the mouth. The chin is round, with a fleshy throat just below. The skin tones vary from light pink under the eyes and on the chin to darker pink on the cheeks and gray in the creases along the mouth and in the shadows. Some of the ground color shows through the flesh tones on the nose and above the mouth.

The man's coat is black and indistinct, due in part to the blanched surface of the painting. The most prominent feature of the costume is a ruffled lace neck cloth, which is gathered at the throat. The lace pattern features a matrix of crossed lines with a design of cascading vines and stylized flowers. The man's proper right hand rests on top of a skull. The four fingers conform to the curvature of the skull, and the tip of the thumb extends in the air slightly. The hollowed-out eyes are nearly perfectly circular, and the hole of the nose is simplified to an inverted heart. A band of tiny teeth form a slight arc. Below the skull is a sheet of white paper on which a poem and monogram signature have been inscribed within faintly visible ruled lines. The paper extends over the edge of the red cloth-covered table on which it sits. Though the artist took care to paint highlights to suggest the folded paper occupying space, he also tipped the letter up unrealistically to allow the viewer to read the text easily.

Smith sits in a red upholstered chair trimmed with a yellow border along the top edge. Large yellow tacks secure the red fabric to the chair frame. Only a corner of the chair is visible to the viewer. Above the chair is a red curtain with several folds defined by wide black lines. The curtain is held in place by a cord, from which hangs a yellow tassel. This drapery is placed against a solid field of unmodulated black. At the upper left corner of the painting is a vertically oriented rectangle, which presumably represents a window. Visible in this scene is a naval battle and a fortress. The battle features three ships, the nearest of which lists in the water, presumably vanquished by one or both of the other vessels. The closest of the two upright ships is turned nearly in profile for the viewer, revealing at least ten gun portals. At the stern of this ship flies a red flag with a loosely painted white design in its field. The distant ship is parallel to the middle ground ship and flies three flags—a rectangular flag with a red, white, and blue stripe at the stern and at the top of the middle mast and a blue pennant on the next mast forward. Orange flames rise up between the two ships, suggesting that they are engaged in battle with each other or with another vessel beyond view. A touch of blue is visible in the sky, which is mainly filled with large clouds that blend with the smoke. A red flag on the lower portion of the fort in the foreground features three crescents and a small circle in the concave curve of each crescent. A plain red flag flies on top of the fort's highest tower.

Biography

Analysis

Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait carries the dual distinctions of being the only seventeenth-century New England painting that is clearly linked to a known painter and the earliest extant American self-portrait.¹² While at least fourteen seventeenth-century painters are named in deeds, wills, and other period documents, only Smith can be linked to a specific surviving canvas.¹³ The identification of the painting as a self-representation is based on family history, the monogram signature, the especially strong psychological presence of the sitter, and the unusual manner in which the painting appears to sum up the sitter's life and philosophy.

This painting and the others by Thomas Smith mark a shift in American art from the Elizabethan style employed by the unknown painter of the Freake family to the baroque style that replaced it in Britain and the colonies. Smith's baroque style employs light and shadow to render the illusion of objects in space, most evident in the exaggerated modeling of the sitter's head and wrinkles, the folds of the lace neck cloth, and the attempt at trompe l'oeil in the bent sheet of paper at the bottom left. Baroque paint handling was bolder than Elizabethan brushwork, and was sometimes applied in broad passages, as in the landscape's smoke and clouds. Smith's version of the court style of Peter Lely (1617–1680) and Godfrey Kneller (1648–1723), however, lacks the finesse of either of the British painters. In the words of one art historian, Smith "rewrote the string quartets of the British court painter Sir Peter Lely for some wild back-country instrument."¹⁴

Despite its stylistic shift toward the baroque, Smith's self-portrait maintains a connection to the emblematic tradition of medieval painting. Emblematic paintings used words and images to convey a complex allegorical whole. Within that tradition the elements were understood symbolically rather than literally and were not meant to pertain narrowly to an individual's life. In Smith's self-portrait, the naval battle scene in the background may thus be interpreted to stand for the trials of life, the skull for mortality, and the poem for the Christian promise of resurrection.

While the window might be understood as a symbol of earthly conflict, it may also represent an actual event or compression of several events in Smith's naval career. On the symbolic level the battle scene is reinforced by the opening lines of the poem:

Why why should I the World be minding

therein a World of Evils Finding.

Then Farwell World: Farwell thy Jarres

thy Joies thy Toies thy Wiles thy Warrs

The art historian Roger Stein proposes that the battle and the related section of the poem could represent political and religious rivals to the Protestant faith.¹⁵ Perhaps the battle is even a reference to the waning Puritan fervor in Boston. Smith painted with enough specificity to suggest a particular biographical episode, though it has not yet been identified. The two upright ships fly Dutch and British flags, while the sinking vessel is unidentified. The fortress in the foreground of the vignette displays red flags with three crescents, which are presumed to represent the Barbary States or some other Muslim power. Stein has also suggested that the vignette could refer to Sir Robert Blake's attack on Tunis in 1655.¹⁶ Alternatively, the scene may represent Smith's participation in one of the Anglo-Dutch Wars, specifically the combined attack of the British and Dutch navies on Cape Spartel on the northwest coast of Morocco in August 1670.¹⁷ Smith has not been confirmed to have been present at any of those confrontations.

Allegorical depictions of battle are found in Elizabethan portraits of aristocratic soldiers and even of the monarch. In the well-known "Armada portrait" of Elizabeth I by George Gower (about 1588, Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire), there are two windows divided by a drapery. To the left the British fleet presides over peaceful waters; to the right the same fleet conquers the Spanish Armada. This precedent is important because it shows how such images of naval battle functioned in British portraiture. In this case, the paired vignettes signify Elizabeth's successful reign as well as the Protestant defeat of a Catholic enemy. Roger Stein pushes the interpretation further, arguing that the Armada portrait represents the conquest of the Antichrist.¹⁸ Steven van der Meulen's portrait John Farnham, Gentleman-Pensioner to Elizabeth I (fig. 1) also includes an emblematic vignette. The battle scene at the upper right may represent an actual conflict, but it also has elements that are clearly allegorical rather than literal. The most important of those elements is the allegorical figure of Fortune standing on a sphere with the inscription "DO CASU NO[N] CO[N]SILIO" (I give by chance, not by reason). The painter drew attention to Fortune by placing her in the foreground of the window and at the intersection of the roads in the landscape.

Smith's use of the window as a device for adding landscapes or narratives related to the biography of a portrait subject followed such Elizabethan examples and set a precedent in American painting that was followed in the eighteenth century by John Singleton Copley, Charles Willson Peale , and Ralph Earl, among others. Smith also used the device in his portraits Major Thomas Savage and Captain Richard Patteshall. In the former Smith employed the vignette to show Savage's role as a military leader and in the latter to depict Patteshall's commercial endeavors. Neither scene appears to carry the additional symbolic level of meaning that he used in his self-portrait, however. Copley, Peale, and Earl appear to have rediscovered this European tradition from imported mezzotints, from emigrant artists, and from studies in England rather than from Smith's paintings.

The vanitas still life in the foreground of Smith's self-portrait is among the first of its kind in American art, though it too stems from a European tradition.¹⁹ Vanitas still lifes were a reminder of the mortality of humankind; in Self-Portrait this motif is made especially evident by the contrast of the pink but wrinkled flesh of Smith's face with the gray skull on the table. The absence of the skull's lower jaw is a further sign of the inevitable decay of flesh and bones. Because elegance and the assertion of wealth and power were more common motivations for portraiture, vanitas references were never popular in American or European art. However, the vanitas theme is found in British and Northern European portraits that express religious devotion. Much as Smith mirrors life and death in one canvas, Northern European paintings sometime paired a life portrait on one panel with an image of death on a facing panel.²⁰ A skull might also be a sign of medical achievement, as in Dr. John Clark (about 1664, Francis A. Countway Library, Harvard Medical School) by an unidentified American artist.²¹ Since the painting was created at the end of Clark's life, it may have been intended as a dual reference to his career and his mortality.

Figure 2. Gravestone of Sarah Baker, about 1700, Copp's Hill Burial Ground, Boston.

Skulls were more common motifs in early American gravestone carving (fig. 2) than in paintings, a fitting parallel to the depiction of life and death in Smith's Self-Portrait.²² Skulls, skeletons, coffins, and candle flames were common images in gravestone carvings of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.²³ The closing lines of Smith's poem summarize the Puritan attitude towards death:

Truth Sounds Retreat: I am not sorye.

The Eternall Drawes to him my heart

By Faith (which can thy Force Subvert)

To Crowne me (after Grace) with Glory.

Death was not be feared, for it delivered earthly saints, as Puritans understood themselves, from an imperfect world into the kingdom of heaven. Similarly, early New England gravestones often paired references to death with images of redemption and afterlife—wings to suggest transcendence, fruit and flowers to symbolize rebirth, and the sun and moon to indicate the perpetual rhythm of life and death. For Self-Portrait, Roger Stein finds yet another level of meaning in the poem and death's head, arguing that the skull above and the text below mirror the format of a gravestone. Stein reads this reminder of death as giving "permission to an expanding capitalist society and to imperial ambition to live in the world" at the same time that it moralizes on those themes.²⁴ Finally, it should be noted that seventeenth-century painters were called upon to create death's heads and other symbols of mourning for funeral processions of prominent figures.²⁵

Although drapery is a conventional element in portraiture, it appears to complement the memento mori theme in this painting. Unlike the curtain in the background of Elizabeth Clarke Freake (Mrs. John Freake ) and Baby Mary, where it serves strictly as a compositional device to balance the woman and child as well as a decorative flourish in an otherwise empty background, the tassel and drapery in Smith's Self-Portrait may have been intended as another reference to the end of life. Like the skull, this is a motif found on early colonial gravestones in Massachusetts.²⁶

The inclusion of the signed poem presents Smith not only as mariner and painter but also as poet, intellectual, and Christian. The poem is written in the three-part structure of the Puritan meditation.²⁷ In the opening section of such meditations, the poet typically posed a problem. For Smith, that problem is the statement, "Why why should I the World be minding/therein a World of Evils Finding." In the second section, the person meditating comes to an intellectual understanding of the problem. In the middle of Smith's poem, he comes to terms with the hardships and pleasures he has experienced and accepts the inevitability of death. The final section of a Puritan meditation is supposed to reflect a deeper spiritual understanding of the problem. Smith closes his poem with the following lines: "The Eternall Drawes to him my heart/By Faith (which can thy Force Subvert)/To Crowne me (after Grace) with Glory." Smith borrows language both from earthly metaphors of warfare—the trumpets of retreat ("Death Sounds Retreat")—as well as from biblical language of redemption. Stein has shown that Smith's references to being crowned with glory derive from passages in both the Old and New Testaments and that Smith is therefore participating in the Puritan belief in typology.²⁸ That is, what is written in the Old Testament prophesies the events of the New Testament, which in turn prefigure contemporary experience.

Similar sentiments can be found in late seventeenth-century Boston wills, such as the one written by Smith's contemporary and possible relative Thomas Clarke in 1679. After designating his desired distribution of worldly goods, Clarke wrote:

Soe farewell the world ever adeiu [sic]

Welcome everlasting mansions & glorious kingdom too

Where I shall reign and triumph over Sin

And spend my time in praises of my King—²⁹

Clarke was the father of Elizabeth Freake, whose portrait had been painted by an unknown artist just a few years before Smith's Self-Portrait. Among the beneficiaries of Clarke's will were his cousin Thomas Smith, whom Clarke gave forty pounds outright and another ten pounds for helping to execute his will. Whether this Smith is the same one who was an artist remains to be determined.

Despite Smith's poetic assertion that he valued the everlasting more than the here and now, he included visual references to his own prosperity. His costume is decorated with an expensive piece of imported lace, and he sits in a leather upholstered chair with large brass studs. The Thomas Smith whose probate inventory was prepared in 1691 left "6: Old Rushia Leather Chaires" valued at 1/10 and another "6: Old Calves Leather Chaires" worth fifteen shillings. Moreover, there were many textiles among the Smith inventory, including eight yards of Bone Lace and a remnant of ribbon worth four shillings. "Tho:^s Smith's wareing Clothes in a Chest" were valued at ten pounds. Smith also owned several valuable looking glasses, a possession implied by the self-representational nature of the portrait.³⁰ While it remains uncertain whether this probate enumerates the possessions of the same Captain Smith who painted this self-portrait, the painting itself hints that the artist possessed material comforts and luxuries. Even the pigments with which Smith chose to paint his image reflect wealth. His eyes and the blue section of the flags in the distance were painted with ultramarine, a color made from crushed semiprecious lapis lazuli stones.³¹ Indeed, Smith's Self-Portrait is the only seventeenth-century American painting known to include this expensive material. But the painting stops short of the Puritan sin of vanity. Smith's visage is weathered by the "Jarres" and "Warrs" of his existence. He has rejected the wigs then worn by gentlemen in Boston, nor does his own gray hair fall in a fashionable coif as in the nearly contemporary portrait of John Freake.

Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait stands as a landmark in American painting. It represents the first of many stylistic shifts undertaken in colonial America to stay current with British taste. The painting is the first known attempt of an American painter to depict himself, the earliest work in New England that can be linked to a specific artist, and perhaps the first American painting to reflect explicitly on the inevitability of death. In spite of the frustration of trying to separate the artist Thomas Smith from the fourteen or so men by the same name in late-seventeenth-century Boston, the painting tells students of American culture a great deal about Puritan attitudes toward timeless considerations of life and death. Perhaps the paradox of gaining so much understanding from the painting while knowing so little about the individual who created it adds to the compelling presence of Self-Portrait as a memento mori.

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The triangle trade and the colonial table, sugar, tea, and slavery

(Smarthistory)

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Chest with Drawers, ca. 1670-1700�Artist unknown�Oak, Pine, Maple, Cedar, 34 x 52 x 20 in.

CHEST WITH DRAWERS Introduction http://www.thinker.org/fam/education/publications/guide-american/slide-3.html

This chest with drawers, made in the Massachusetts Bay Colony around 1670-1700, is an example of a common piece of furniture used in New England during colonial times. According to evidence from wills and household inventories, locking chests were used for storing bulky items, particularly textiles.

Discussion

The design of the chest reflects furniture fashions from England. Household objects from the earliest American settlement demonstrate that the Massachusetts colonists, whatever their disagreement with the ruling establishment in England may have been, brought a decidedly European culture to America. The weight and bulk of this chest is also indicative of the colonists determination to establish stable and enduring homesteads in America.

Textiles, which may have been stored in this chest, were considered extremely valuable pieces of property. An inventory of the possessions of Michael Metcalfe, a farmer from Dedham, Massachusetts lists with his furniture the textiles he owned. "a joined Chest with 6 pr [pair] sheets, 12 napkins, 3 pr of pillowbeers [the case that holds the feathers of a pillow], 2Table Cloths and a Towell.“

Looking Closely

It is assumed that the top of the chest was lost at some point and was replaced; this is why the top has a slightly different appearance than the body of the chest.

Style

The style and design of this chest are very similar to furniture fashions from non-urban areas in England during this time period. The round uprights were turned on a lathe and cut in half, but all other decoration is handcarved. The framework of the chest is grooved to hold the wooden panels that form the sides and bottom of the chest, and every place where a vertical and a horizontal part of the framework meet, is fastened with a mortise (rectangular cavity or groove) and tenon joint (projecting piece of wood). The chests were thus called "joined" chests, and the men who made them "joiners," who practiced the craft of "joinery." The peg visible near most of the joints is the pin that holds the mortise and tenon together.

Artist

We do not know the name of the craftsman who made this chest because records of furniture makers were not kept. Since the decoration on this chest and the technique used to assemble it are similar to that of other chests known to be made near Medfield, Massachusetts, historians can speculate that the same craftsman worked in both locations.

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Africa House, Melrose Plantation (1796)

Melrose Plantation was established in 1796 by former slave Louis Metoyer, a free person of color. In the 1820’s, Metoyer commissioned his enslaved workers to construct the house however, no records exist that give an exact date of its construction, original purpose or explain its unusual design which reflects the style of traditional architecture of houses in Africa.

Today, the two-story hut-like building stands threatened by deterioration and destabilization. Preservation of the brick masonry walls and roof structure are needed to ensure the site is protected and reopened for public tours as an important part of the story of Melrose Plantation.

“African House is a unique testament to the confluence of cultures that helped to shape Louisiana, and America as a whole,” said Stephanie Meeks, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “The architecture at African House speaks boldly of the presence of African culture along the Cane River– and symbolizes how African and French influences combined in this region.”

In naming the African House a National Treasure, the National Trust is committed to supporting the site’s restoration. The National Trust’s HOPE Crew (“Hands-on Preservation Experience” Crew) will address repair needs on the roof and other exteriors. HOPE Crew is an initiative of the National Trust that trains thousands of crew members in useful historic preservation skills.

“African House speaks for generations of hard working individuals through its massive hand hewn cypress beams and handmade bricks,” said Vicki Parrish, president of the Association for the Preservation of Historic Natchitoches which owns and operates Melrose Plantation.

“As preservationists, our mission is to listen to the voices of the past, and it is through the restoration of their handiwork that we discover just what they are telling us. It is our hope that every person who visits African House will discover for themselves a distinct voice from our culturally rich Cane River past.”

Further enhancing the historical significance of African House are nine murals by folk artist Clementine Hunter. Painted in oil on plywood and installed on the building’s interior walls, the murals depict early 20th century landscapes and scenes of daily life at the plantation.

As a farm-hand at Melrose Plantation, Hunter began painting in the 1930s when she was in her 50s. She created more than 4,000 paintings over four decades, drawing national acclaim and exhibits in galleries across the country. Today, Hunter’s works are sought after by collectors. The African House murals have been conserved and will be returned to African House when the building’s restoration is completed.

“Clementine Hunter left an indelible mark on Melrose Plantation with her inspired murals,” said Meeks. “These amazing works of folk art were created for the African House, and they should be exhibited there. We are working to see that happen.”

To learn more about plans to restore the African House, visit www.savingplaces.org/Africanhouse

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Bequette–Ribault House in Ste. Geneviève, Missouri, built 1778, French colonial

The Bequette Ribault House was built by Jean-Baptiste Bequette, Sr. in 1808 and is located across from Le Grand Champ agricultural fields from the original French settlement in the mid-1700s. The two-room house is most noted architecturally by its Norman truss and “poteaux-en-terre” construction, or “posts-in-the-earth,” a reference to its vertical logs built directly into the ground.

CULTURAL HISTORY The  Bequette Ribault House  was originally built by the  Bequette family, a prominent Ste. Genevieve family.  Upon Bequette Jr.’s death,  the property was auctioned in March of 1840 on  the church steps to the  highest bidder, Antoine  Recole, a free man of color,  for $405. Two months  later, Recole sold the property for the same amount to a free woman of color named Clarisse, a former slave of the Francois Janis household.

Jean-Baptiste Bequette, Jr.’s acquaintance, Jean Ribault, was a wealthy resident of Ste. Genevieve and had been a minor aristocrat in France. During the time she was a slave, Clarisse gave birth to two children who were given the last name Ribault. Interestingly, Clarisse was included in Jean Ribault’s will, who died in 1849. The only owners of the property from 1840 until 1969 were Clarisse and two generations of her descendants, all of who had the last name Ribault. Research continues in the pursuit to historically preserve the story of The Bequette Ribault’s inhabitants with many questions unanswered at this time.

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Homeplace Plantation St. Charles Parish Louisiana 1787

Homeplace Plantation, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970, is located on the west bank of the Mississippi River in St. Charles Parish. Constructed between 1787 and 1791, it is one of the finest and least altered examples of a large French Colonial raised cottage left standing. Similar in plan to another National Historic Landmark, Parlange in Point Coupee Parish, Homeplace is two rooms deep and four rooms across with a 16 foot-wide gallery on all sides, providing separate access to each of the second story rooms for cross ventilation. The upper story walls are constructed of cypress timbers in-filled with clay and Spanish moss. The lower story, with its thick brick walls and floors, contained seven service rooms, including the large dining room, a pantry, two wine rooms, a hall, and two storage rooms. The wine rooms still retain some of the original wine racks and the dining room walls are decorated in original green-gray and white Italian marble tiles.

Once the center of a large sugar plantation, Homeplace was originally surrounded by slave's quarters, pigeonniers (structures used by upper-class French for housing pigeons), a carriage house, and other dependencies used in plantation operations. Only the carriage house remains to the right rear of the house. An interesting feature of the house are tall brick pillars at the south end that once supported a large wooden cistern that supplied water to the house. The builder and first owner of Homeplace are unclear, but documents show that the plantation was owned by both Pierre Gaillard and Louis Edmond Fortier during its early years. The Fortier family owned the house until 1856 and it changed hands a number of times before Pierre Anatole Keller purchased the property in 1889. Keller dismantled the sugar production operation and tore down the sugar mill in 1894. Adding stairs to the front of the house in 1900, in addition to the original side stairs, the Keller family modernized the house and made some minor alterations. The Keller family continues to own the property today.

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Diamond Within a Square Amish Folk Art, Lancaster County (1737)

Amish quilt: Diamond in the square. Quiltmaker unidentified, Lancaster County, Pa., 1920–1940. Wool with cotton backing. 81 x 79-1/2 inches. Collection of American Folk Art Museum, N.Y.; gift of Paige Rense. 1981.4.1.

The quilt is typical of Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County examples in that it is made from fine woolens in solid colors, its dimensions are essentially square, the center medallion is surrounded by a narrow inner border, and the outer border is wide with large corner blocks.

The “diamond in the square” pattern is specific to Amish quiltmakers in Lancaster County. Like many Amish quilts, it elicits a powerful but equivocal response in non-Amish viewers. The simplicity of large triangular and rectangular pieces in solid color fields conveys a sense of timelessness and quiet depths. The pattern feels old, yet the colors feel modern; it bears no relation to transitory tastes. These emotions are consciously evoked, as the Amish intentionally developed a system of quilt patterns that were in fact “out of time.” The center medallion format provokes an expectation of great age, while in fact most examples that have survived were made in the twentieth century. It meets, as scholars have pointed out, the Amish standard of nonconformity to outside fashion. Ironically, through their very conservatism, they become innovators.

Cultural and religious reinforcement may have been one impetus for the development of the diamond in the square design. While some scholars posit that all quiltmakers encode meanings into their quilts, Anita Schorsch, in her book Plain and Fancy: Country Quilts of the Pennsylvania Germans , expresses the belief that this is most particularly true of quilts made by Pennsylvania Germans. For her, the predilection for abstraction and geometry in Amish quilts is a product of outsiders in American society trying to avoid contact with mainstream society; an attempt to “make messages harder to decipher and therefore easier to keep private.”

In many symbolic systems, the points of a diamond negotiate the realms between sky and water, the unknowable God and our physical world. In the Jewish mysticism known as kabbalah, an amalgam of diamonds forms a “tree” that comprises the ten creative forces that intervene between these spheres. In African symbolism, the four points of the diamond form a cosmogram, symbolizing the world of the heavens and the world of the ancestors. The diamond in the square is a medieval ideogram representing the four elements: air and fire at the top, earth and water at the bottom. Such medieval messages may have been grist for the mill of symbolism in Germanic communities. As Schorsch writes, “There was for many Pennsylvania Germans a ‘proper’ juxtaposition of stars and planets…which coincided with the seasons…and the four ‘medical’ humors.” The pattern may be a direct reference to the emblem published in 1626 by Thomas Jenner: a diamond and a square, meant to fit into each other the way man and God are meant to fit together. Still, the inspiration may be as prosaic as designs tooled onto the leather covers of the Amish Ausbund, or book of rules.

Let’s look at this quilt again. Now we see outsiders within a community of insiders; a sect within a larger society; conformity within nonconformity; innovation within conservatism. A diamond within a square.

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Rocking Chair with Arms, 1850-60 Hancock Shaker Village

http://www.hancockshakervillage.org/experience/living_history_faq.html

Shakers, from their shivering community dances. Shaker design: purity and strictly functional, a precursor of modernist rationality

SHAKER ROCKER

ca. 1820, usa

The shakers, or united society of believers, a religious sect, was founded in britain and came to north america during the

revolutionary war. first independent communities were found in america in 1774. chiefly rural and self-sustaining, they produced furniture which was simple and functional in design, well-proportioned, with no carving or decorative painting, noted for its austere beauty.

shaker rocking chairs have a ladder-back with a simple finial (the shape at the top of the rocker frame) and woven seats

usually made from leather, wool or cane. shaker furniture makers frequently made things in multiples,such production methods were not only efficient, but theyhelped to ensure uniformity.at the same time, however they designed individual pieces to suit a certain believer's size. a rocking chair - as a suit of cloth -might well be extra large or small for a particular individual. earlier chairs were heavier. in the 1860s brother robert wagan, designed the ultimate shaker rocking chair.

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Justus Englehardt Kühn (d. 1717)�Henry Darnall III c. 1710

Henry Darnall III was a wealthy planter in Colonial Maryland. He was the son of the politician and planter Henry Darnall II, and the grandson of Henry Darnall who was the Proprietary Agent of Charles Calvert, 3rd Baron Baltimore

Creator: Kühn, Justus Engelhardt

Description: Full-length portrait shows Henry Darnall III as a boy in yellow-orange tunic and green cape holding a bow and arrow. To the left is an African American boy in an orange coat, holding a dead bird. Darnall stands in an architectural setting with balustrades at sides, and formal gardens and buildings behind. Oil on canvas by Justus Englehardt K

Date of Original: ca. 1710

The earliest known portrait of an African American in colonial painting is Justus Kühn’s Henry Darnall III as a Child, c. 1710. Kühn (d. 1717) was a German immigrant to the Annapolis area in the first decade of the eighteenth century. He offered his Maryland clients the fantasy of European-style grandeur. He portrayed Henry Darnall, son of one of Maryland’s wealthiest families, as a young aristocrat of imperious mien. Darnall’s world is defined by his possessions, from his richly embroidered jacket and flowing green tunic (an allusion to classical portraiture) to the idealized garden on the other side of the balustrade. No such garden existed in the colonies in 1710. The garden’s tight geometry, instead, represents a fantasy of an ordered, stable, and hierarchical world linked to class privilege and property ownership.

Kühn thus takes a young provincial from the New World and portrays him as an assured member of a transatlantic aristocracy. Darnall’s black slave, in turn, attends his master from behind and below, fenced by the balustrade. The silver shackle around his neck indicates his status as property. The artist seems less interested in the slave as a person than in his fine attire, concerned that the domestic slave of an elite family must appear outfitted for the role. Accordingly, as young Darnall sports the weapons of the hunt, amusing himself, as a young gentleman should, with leisurely and aristocratic pursuits, his slave admires him.

—Angela L. Miller, et al., American Encounters: Art, History, and Cultural Identity (2008)

Medium: Painting

Description: Full-length portrait shows Henry Darnall III as a boy in yellow-orange tunic and green cape, holding a bow and arrow. To the left is an African-American boy in an orange coat, holding a dead bird. Darnall stands in an architectural setting with balustrades at sides, and formal gardens and buildings behind. http://www.marylandartsource.org/artwork/detail_000000332.html

A german émigré painter who worked in Annapolis until his death in 1717, Justus Englehardt Kuhn painted one of the sons of the Maryland aristocracy, Henry Darnall III. The boy is eight or ten years old, armed with a bow and arrow, kitted out in lace, a heavily embroidered jacket, and a green cloak: a baroque doll. A young slave gazes at him with submissive adoration, holding a dead quail. The African American boy wears a polished silver collar, like a favourite dog. This is the first appearance of a black in colonial painting. Behind them stretches an idealized landscape with parterres and a statue on a plinth which must have been copied from some European print. The bulbous balusters, the base of the column, and the cartouche with the cherub’s head in it are all likewise fictions. No properties in America looked like this. The image records the defiant illusory desire of the colonial gentry to imagine themselves as an extension of European culture

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Portrait of Catherine Ogden, 1730s Pieter Vanderlyn

During the 18th century, a woman was defined by her role as wife and mother. Here the artist portrays Mrs. Ogden pointing to her breast, a reference to her heart and love and to the feeding and nurturing of her children. Mrs. Ogden’s left hand, positioned over her womb, holds a flower, symbolizing fertility.

This may be a wedding portrait, since female portraits were often commissioned at the time of marriages, the wedding ring is prominently displayed, and the sitter wears a red dress, which along with white was traditional for weddings. Vanderlyn worked in rural New York State and was self-taught, as is reflected in his flat style.

American colonial painter Pieter Vanderlyn was born in the Netherlands in 1687. He moved to Kingston, New York in 1718, where he became a portrait painter and land speculator. The painting ascribed to Vanderlyn with the most certainty is that of Mrs. Petrus Vas, his mother-in-law. The 19th century artist John Vanderlyn was his grandson.

Pieter Vanderlyn's style as a self-taught artist is very flat. His work may have been an influence on the 20th century Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani, whose flat style and perspective in portraits is much like Vanderlyn�s.

This painting of Catherine Ogden, a resident of Newark, New Jersey, is thought to be a wedding portrait because her wedding ring is prominently displayed and she is wearing red. (At the time of the painting, red and white were both traditional colors for weddings.) Vanderlyn portrayed Mrs. Ogden pointing to her breast, a reference to her heart, to love, and to the feeding of children. Her left hand, resting over her womb, holds a flower symbolizing fertility.(1)

Another fascinating interpretation of the flowers held by women in early American portraits has been advanced by Paul Staiti, who writes: �Whenever cultivated flowers and fruits were shown in a portrait, they were meant to be understood as the product of a woman�s discipline, science, handiwork, and thus character. Women did not merely grow flowers, they reared them, much as they did children, or as they themselves had been raised.� In this analysis, the flowers in Ogden�s hand are �gendered objects that express feminine accomplishment, virtue, and class distinction.�(2) (LJP)

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Hannah Babcock (Mrs. John Bours), 1759 Oil on canvas 50 3/16 x 40 1/8 in. (127.5 x 102 cm)

Description

Hannah Babcock is a three-quarter-length portrait of a young woman standing. Her body is placed nearly at the center of the composition and faces front. The subject’s head is slightly turned and tilted toward the viewer’s left. Her hair is pulled back from her face, with loose curls visible above the proper left ear and at the back of her head. She wears a hair ornament consisting of a blue ribbon, a blue rectangular stone, and a yellow flower or feather. The young woman has an oval face, almond-shaped blue eyes, and softly modeled features. Her arms cross in front of her body, with her proper left hand resting on her right wrist. In her right hand, she holds a fluffy fan consisting of two multicolored (red, blue, yellow, brown, and white) feathers.

The subject’s off-white dress has a low-cut, nearly square neckline and is embellished with a transparent collar, white lace at the neck and sleeves, and blue ribbons at the bodice and cuffs. The tight bodice is further ornamented with two rows of white floral embroidery framing a narrow V-shaped panel at the center of her torso; a strand of pearls begins at the middle of the ribbon on her bodice and forms a pair of mirrored arches that extend to her sides at the waist. Her skirt billows widely and, like the loosely draped fabric of her sleeves, shimmers in deep and shallow folds.

The figure is set in a garden with a reddish-brown urn on a pedestal behind her at the right and trees and an orange-tinged sky to the left. The sky is blue-green behind the figure and pure blue in the upper-left corner. The largest tree forms a diagonal from the upper-left corner of the canvas to the young woman’s proper right shoulder and arm. The tiered curves and volumes of the urn loosely trace an inverted outline of the young woman’s head, body, and dress. The background objects–urn, trees, and bushes–are painted in broad, loose brushstrokes.

Biography

Hannah Babcock was born on January 22, 1743, to Dr. Joshua Babcock (1707–1783) and Hannah Stanton Babcock (1714–1778), in Westerly, Rhode Island, a town about thirty miles west of Newport. She was sixteen when Blackburn painted her portrait. Hannah was the fourth of nine children and the oldest of five girls. Her father, a member of the class of 1724 at Yale, studied medicine in Boston and London and practiced in Westerly for about a quarter-century. Babcock owned a six-thousand-acre plantation operated by Narragansett Indians, ran a thriving retail business, and was Westerly’s first postmaster. He is said to have been appointed to this office by Benjamin Franklin, a mezzotint of whom hung in the Babcock house among the family’s own portraits.¹ Babcock was active in politics, serving in the General Assembly for nine years and as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the colony for sixteen. He would later prove to be an ardent patriot, serving as a major general of the Rhode Island militia.² His newspaper obituary read, in part:

As a Patriot—a Magistrate—a Physician—his Character shone conspicuous.—In the domestic Walks of Life, let the Wise—the Child—the Servant—the Friend and the Neighbour witness, that, few equalled, none surpassed him.³

Hannah married John Bours (1734–1815) at Trinity Church, Newport, on July 7, 1762.⁴ The families of the young couple were acquainted because Dr. Babcock and John’s father, Peter Bours (about 1705/06–1761), served together in the colonial general assembly. Hannah bore eleven children, the first five of whom died in childhood, four in infancy.⁵ John Bours was a merchant at the Sign of the Golden Eagle, Thames Street, where he sold English, Continental, and West Indian imports, including fabrics, metals, jewelry, sugar, rice, coffee, tea, wine, rum, raisins, lemons, and spices.⁶ For many years, he was treasurer of the Redwood Library in Newport, and served on its board of directors.⁷ He also was active in the Trinity Church as vestryman and church warden; in 1782 Bours acted as lay reader in the absence of a minister, and two years later, he declined a request that he "enter into holy orders and become their minister."⁸

Hannah Babcock Bours’s gravestone reads simply: "Sacred/ May this stone long remain/ a Tribute of Affection/ to the memory of/ HANNAH BOURS/ wife of JOHN BOURS/ and DAUGHTER of/ JOSHUA BABCOCK/ late of Westerly/ in this state/ who died Decemb^r 17^th 1796/ aged 54 years."⁹

Analysis

When Dr. Babcock commissioned Joseph Blackburn in 1759 to paint his daughter’s portrait, the artist had moved from Boston to Portsmouth, New Hampshire. This suggests that the artist continued to travel to accept commissions, since his first portraits on the North American mainland were painted in Newport in 1754.¹⁰

Blackburn’s skill at painting costume is evident in this portrait, where he has convincingly represented the lustrous surface of satin and the delicate character of lace. Hannah’s generalized features, consisting of soft, nearly geometric volumes, suggest that the portrait is as much an idealization of female beauty as it is a carefully delineated likeness. Her smooth features and light skin convey her youth and comeliness, and her erect posture demonstrates her feminine grace.

Figure 1. John Faber, Jr., after Thomas Hudson, Miss Hudson, 1740s, mezzotint, 13 3/4 x 9 3/4 in. (34.9 x 24.8 cm), Trustees of the British Museum, London.

Figure 2. Peter Paul Rubens, Helena Fourment, about 1620, oil on canvas, 73 1/4 x 33 1/2 in. (186.1 x 85.1 cm), Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, Portugal.

This painting also is typical of Blackburn in that it casts the sitter in a fantasy drawn from an English rococo mezzotint. Hannah Babcock is represented in a pose, costume, and setting all borrowed from Thomas Hudson’s portrait of his daughter, Miss Hudson, which Blackburn probably had available in a print (fig. 1) by John Faber, Jr. (d. 1756) after the original.¹¹ Blackburn’s three-quarter-length composition, in place of the whole length in Faber’s print after Hudson, tightened the focus on the figure and eliminated the dog at bottom right. Whereas the dress follows Hudson closely in its overall contours and especially in its folds, Blackburn substituted a few flowers for the large plumed hat, opened the neckline substantially, and adjusted the position of the pearls that decorate the bodice. In Hudson’s portrait, the pearls support a portrait in miniature, and in Blackburn’s they are simply ornamental. Blackburn also crossed the right hand over instead of under the left one and lowered the plume to follow the billow of the skirt more closely. Blackburn’s reflection of Hudson’s style and poses has led some scholars to speculate that Hudson may have been the younger painter’s master.¹²

Hudson’s portrait, in turn, owes its composition largely to that of Peter Paul Rubens’s Helena Fourment (fig. 2), which had entered the famous English collection of Sir Robert Walpole about 1730.¹³ Rubens’s portrait remained influential in London well beyond Blackburn’s departure for the colonies, inspiring additional portraits by Hudson as well as by Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Highmore, John Hoppner, Joseph van Aken, Allan Ramsay, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and George Romney.¹⁴ Wearing Van Dyck costume was popular in London in the 1730s and 1740s, and being portrayed in this manner would have been a statement of the sitter’s sophistication. For an American sitter, aspirations to fashionability were well served by this model. Copley borrowed from the same source in his portrait Mrs. Samuel Quincy (Hannah Hill) (about 1764, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), perhaps following the lead of Blackburn, who had a decided impact on the native-born painter in the late 1750s. Copley might have had the opportunity to see Blackburn’s Hannah Babcock when he painted his likeness of the young woman’s husband, John Bours, though the place and time of that commission have not been firmly established.¹⁵

Costume portraits were popular in eighteenth-century London, where sitters might actually dress as they appeared in such portraits for masquerade balls. As Horace Walpole noted in a 1742 letter, at one a masquerade he saw "quantities of Vandykes, and all kinds of old pictures walked out of their frames."¹⁶ In a more obvious pictorial reference to costume than that found in Hannah Babcock, the portrait Sarah Riddell Harvey (about 1752–53, private collection, Bermuda), Blackburn depicted a young woman holding a black mask. Despite this continuity of interest between London and the colonies, the costume historian Aileen Ribeiro argues that American women did not have the opportunity to wear such clothes to costume balls.¹⁷ Their identification with the London vogue for Van Dyck costume was limited to the imagination, and its realization in portraiture.

Figure 3. Joseph Blackburn, Dr. Joshua Babcock, about 1761, oil on canvas, 45 1/8 x 36 3/4 in. (114.6 x 93.3 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Gift of Augustus H. Eustis, 64.1010. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Reproduced with permission. © 2000 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All Rights Reserved.

Joseph Blackburn enjoyed extended patronage from the Babcock family, earning from its members at least three other commissions—to paint Hannah’s brother, father, and mother, all three-quarter length, over a five-year period: Colonel Harry Babcock (1756, private collection); Dr. Joshua Babcock (fig. 3); and Mrs. Joshua Babcock (Hannah Stanton) (1761, private collection). Although Blackburn is not usually commended for capturing the character of his sitters, in the four Babcock portraits he successfully portrayed the distinctive roles of young and old, male and female in eighteenth-century polite society. Whereas Hannah Babcock appears appropriately feminine and demure, Blackburn represented her older brother Harry (1736–1800) with the swaggering self-assurance befitting an aspiring military officer who was already a veteran of the French and Indian War.¹⁸ Their parents, by contrast, are depicted in upright, seated poses that evoke a greater reserve and seriousness than those of their children. One historian of Rhode Island noted that Dr. Babcock and several of his contemporaries "owned valuable libraries," a distinction suggested in Blackburn’s portrait.¹⁹ Babcock holds a book in his right hand, marking his place with his index finger; two more books rest under his arm. One of Dr. Babcock’s students testified to his erudition, saying that he led family worship from a Bible in Greek.²⁰ When Hannah’s father died, his probate inventory recorded "4 Family Portrait Pictures" valued at twelve pounds; the reference is probably to these four works by Blackburn. The Babcock house was also decorated with thirteen mezzotints, a framed map of Connecticut, and, in a bedroom upstairs, another family portrait and four pictures painted on glass.²¹ The Babcock and Bours families were devotees of portraits: Hannah’s brother Adam (1740–1817) and his wife Abigail Smith Babcock (1744–1777) later commissioned oil portraits from Copley and Gilbert Stuart and miniatures of Adam by Henry Pelham after Copley, as well as miniatures of two of their children by Edward Malbone; John Bours’s brother, the Reverend Peter Bours (1726–1762), also sat for Blackburn.

John Singleton Copley produced a portrait of Hannah’s husband about 1760–62. John Bours is painted on the same scale and also in a three-quarter-length format; perhaps it was intended to hang as a pendant to his wife’s depiction by Blackburn. Bours is seated and faces right, with a book in his right hand and his left hand lifted to his brow. He is set outdoors in a loosely brushed landscape that resembles the one in Hannah Babcock’s portrait; similarly smoky hues are lightened with peach-colored clouds. That the two paintings are framed nearly identically in solid, shallow-carved frames further suggests that they may have hung in the Bours house as a pair. In one respect, however, these portraits are strikingly different: the mood of whimsy and the emphasis on fashion and display in Hannah’s portrait contrast sharply with the sense of introspection in John’s. Dr. Babcock’s probate inventory further supports the idea that the portrait of Hannah hung in her father’s house until his death in 1783. Probably, both pictures were together after that, as they descended in the family of her youngest son, Luke Bours (1784–1842), who settled in Charleston, South Carolina.²²

The pairing of a female portrait by Blackburn and a male companion by Copley is found in other New England families of the day. For instance, Blackburn’s three-quarter-length Mrs. Epes Sargent (Catharine Winthrop) (about 1755) preceded Copley’s Epes Sargent (1760, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) in the same format; and a pair of half-lengths was painted by Blackburn, Catherine Saltsonstall Richards (1762) and Copley, John Richards (1770–71) (both at Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York, as of 1983). Blackburn’s Mrs. Thomas Flucker (Hannah Waldo) (1755) predates Copley’s Thomas Flucker (1770–72) (both Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine), but the two are in different formats. It is tempting to see Blackburn’s rococo style as a feminine counterpart to Copley’s more masculine realism. But the commissions may also reflect a shift in taste, the ascendance of Copley as the more esteemed painter, or simply Blackburn’s absence when the second portraits were desired.

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Mary Turner Sargent, 1763�John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)�Oil on canvas, 50 x 40 in.

MARY TURNER SARGENT Introduction

http://www.thinker.org/fam/education/publications/guide-american/slide-5.html

This work was painted by John Singleton Copley, widely considered the greatest American portraitist of the eighteenth century. Copley was the first American artist to succeed in creating the illusion of a three-dimensional reality on canvas. This portrait depicts Mary Turner Sargent of Gloucester, Massachusetts shortly after her marriage to Daniel Sargent, a wealthy ship owner.

Discussion

As modern viewers, we appreciate this portrait of Mary Sargent primarily as a beautiful representation of a person who lived in the distant past. To Mary Sargent's contemporaries, the picture contained much more information. With the help of a boned corset, Mary stands perfectly erect, holding her arms in a pose that may now seem somewhat dramatic and pretentious, but which was then considered to be graceful. This posture did not come naturally to Mary Sargent; it was taught to her as a young child. By walking and standing in this refined manner, Mary Sargent silently announced the kind of upbringing she had. Today, most parents do not formally teach posture to children, or make young girls wear corsets (or hoop skirts, for that matter). However, the idea that good posture indicates a good upbringing and a positive self-image is still with us. When someone tells you to stand up straight, or not to lean back on your chair, their ideas about the "proper" way to stand or sit are based on the same ideas about posture that Mary Sargent learned as a young child in colonial America.

Looking Closely

There is no evidence of a colonial garden resembling the one in the walled patio where Mary Sargent stands. Like the portrait of Grizzell Apthorp, this setting was probably copied from a print so that the painting would resemble a portrait of an upper class English person. Copley often relied on English models for his compositions. Mary Sargent holds a scallop shell in a stream of water, symbolism also borrowed from an English print. The shell is an attribute of Venus, the Roman goddess of love and beauty, while the water symbolizes life and purity.

Style

Even though Mary Sargent stands in a fictitious place, her size and the realistic way she is portrayed make it easy for us to accept her as"real." (Whereas in the portrait of Grizzell Apthorp, we may have a harder time perceiving her as real.) Mary Sargent's portrait may appear more real because of the painstaking way the artist painted all of the different textures and surfaces in the picture. A visitor to Copley's studio noted that he would mix paint on his palette for every individual tint and hold each color up to his model to confirm its accuracy--a very long process. Think of all the subtle gradations of color -- even within a small part of the face -- and imagine how much time this would take. Mary Sargent's son reported that his mother told him that she sat for this painting "fifteen or sixteen times! Six hours at a time!"

Artist

Copley's stepfather was an engraver who taught him the many skills required of an artist. By the age of twenty-five, Copley was one of the most successful portrait painters in the colonies, renowned for his ability to paint likenesses and realistic renditions of the lace, textiles, and furniture with which the wealthiest citizens surrounded themselves. Colonial Boston proved too limited for Copley, whose ambition and drive for self-improvement gave him a desire to live in England. After he submitted a painting to the Royal Academy in London in 1765, prominent members of the Royal Academy urged Copley to study in London. Increasing tensions between the colonies and England only added impetus to Copley's plans to relocate to a place where he could pursue his career without difficultly. Although not interested in politics himself, Copley knew that if he chose either side in the struggle for independence, he would alienate half of his clientele. Copley sailed for England in 1774 on the eve of the American Revolution, and he remained there for the last forty years of his life

MARY TURNER SARGENT Introduction

http://www.thinker.org/fam/education/publications/guide-american/slide-5.html

Discussion

Looking Closely

Style

Artist

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Portrait of Mrs. Joseph Scott, ca. 1765 �John Singleton Copley

Mrs. Scott was the wife of a Boston merchant, an active Loyalist, who sold supplies to the British troops in Boston on the eve of the Revolutionary War. The Scotts fled for England in 1776. Copley had left for England two years earlier.

Copley was the most successful artist of his day. Why

Copley was successful because he captured the material possessions of his sitters with his brilliant rendering of textures. He was able to turn paint into silk, as seen in Mrs. Scott's dress. His clients were primarily prosperous Boston merchants.

What makes Mrs. Scott stylish?

Mrs. Scott is wearing the latest fashions of the British aristocracy, popular with Boston merchant families. She wears a "sack," an English-style dress for married women made of expensive imported silk. In her hair is a "Chinese pompom," a hair ornament worn by tasteful English ladies.

Whose pearl necklace is Mrs. Scott wearing?

We don't know. The necklace appears in a number of other Copley portraits and is a reminder that Copley's portraits were often fictions designed to enhance the prestige of the sitter. The background drapery and the pose, taken from engravings after European court portraits, are also fictions.

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Mrs Joseph Barrell (Hannah Fitch) (1771) John Singleton Copley

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Mrs. Richard Skinner (Dorothy Wendell) (1772) John Singleton Copley

Mrs. Richard Skinner was the wife Captain Skinner of Marblehead. Copley displayed an incredible attention to detail in this elegant reflection of the flower held by the subject in the highly polished mahogany table. The dress and elegant furniture all lead to the conclusion, meant to be inferred by all who saw the work, that this lady is of the wealthy class. The portrait would hang in her home to be viewed by all guests.

http://www.iatwm.com/200406/Copley/

Another portrait in the exhibition is believed to represent Mrs. Richard Skinner, wife of Captain Richard Skinner of Marblehead, Massachusetts. Dressed in an elaborate formal gown of imported Spitalfields silk, Mrs. Skinner is shown seated at a mahogany gate leg table, gazing wistfully beyond the frame. In her left hand—beautifully reflected in the highly polished table top—she holds a sprig of Canterbury bells.

http://www.artdaily.com/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=10471

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Mrs. Thomas Gage (Margaret Kemble) 1772 John Singelton Copley

In 1771, Copley left his native Boston for a six-month stay in New York, where he accepted numerous portrait commissions. His first subject was Margaret Kemble Gage, the American-born wife of General Thomas Gage, commander-in-chief of the British forces in North America (who had sat for a portrait by the artist in 1768).

Mrs. Gage wears a turbanlike swath of drapery, a silk caftan over a lace-trimmed chemise, and an embroidered belt - a Turkish-style costume that enhances her languid pose. Such clothing was fashionable at British fancy dress balls, but since masquerade balls were not held at the time in New York, Mrs. Gage would have had no occasion to wear the costume outside the studio. Her faraway gaze suggests pensive thought and intellectuality, implying that she was not preoccupied with trivial matters. This is the first painting in which Copley depicted a woman in such exotic clothing or in such a state of melancholic reverie.

The centerpiece of Turkish Fashion in 18th Century America is the masterful portrait which John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) produced in 1771 for Margaret Kemble Gage, the American-born wife of Thomas Gage, Commander in Chief of British forces in America. It is a prized part of the Timken Museum of Art's permanent collection. The artist himself deemed the portrait "beyond Compare the best Lady's portrait I ever Drew." The image of romantic fashionability, Mrs. Gage is depicted wearing an iridescent caftan over a lace trimmed chemise with a jeweled brooch at her breast and an embroidered belt at her waist. Pearls and a turban-like swath of drapery adorn her hair. Copley's depiction of Mrs.Gage in turban and uncorseted caftan make this one of the most sexually charged portraits produced in colonial America.

Mrs. Gage's wish to be portrayed in turquerie put her in the company of countless English women who were "going Turkish" to masquerade balls. Their American peers, however, who had no occasions to wear such costumes, participated in the exhilarating world of exotic disguise through portraiture. In the artist's studio, clients had the chance to look more stylish than they could in real life. Copley offered his subjects the option of selecting poses, settings, costumes, and coiffures from English sources. In the space of the painted canvas, he created for them alternate or desired appearances.

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/3aa/3aa578.htm

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Phillis Wheatley Revue des Colonies (1834)

A rare portrait of Phillis Wheatley shows her facing forward, wearing an evening dress and jewelry. The portrait appeared in Revue des Colonies in Paris between 1834 and 1842.

Phillis Wheatley was the first African American, the first slave, and the third woman in the United States to publish a book of poems.

Kidnapped in West Africa and transported aboard the slave ship Phillis to Boston in 1761, she was purchased by John Wheatley as a servant for his wife. Young Phillis quickly learned to speak English and to read the Bible with amazing fluency.

Because of her poor health, obvious intelligence, and Susannah Wheatley's fondness for her, Phillis was never trained as a domestic; instead she was encouraged by the Wheatleys to study theology and the English, Latin and Greek classics. She published her first poem in 1767, and six years later, she published a book, Poems on Various Subjects. That same year, John Wheatley emancipated her.

Wheatley achieved international renown, traveling to London to promote her book and being called upon as well as received by noted social and political figures of the day -- including George Washington, to whom she wrote a poem of praise at the beginning of the war, and Voltaire, who referred to her "very good English verse."

Wheatley lived in poverty after her 1778 marriage to John Peters, a free black Bostonian. Although Wheatley advertised for subscriptions to a second volume of poems and letters, she died before she was able to secure a publisher. Her final manuscript was never found.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2p12.html

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Copley, John Singleton Paul Revere c. 1768-70 Oil on canvas 35 x 28 1/2 in. (88.9 x 72.3 cm) Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Text from "Sister Wendy's American Masterpieces":

"The year 1768 was an important one for two young Bostonians: John Singleton Copley, who painted this picture, and Paul Revere, who sat for it. They were both in their early thirties, and they could not have been more different. This was a time of extreme political tension, when Boston was divided into Whigs, who wanted freedom, and Tories, who were content to stay British. Paul Revere was deeply political - and 100 percent Whig. Copley, on the other hand, was completely uninterested in politics; he wanted only to be neutral, which was not possible. He was about to marry into one of the leading Tory families, the Clarkes (owners of the notorious tea concession). Copley was performing a balancing act, but this was the year when he wrote that he felt he must leave America and go to live in England. There he could be an artist and a gentleman - while silversmith Paul Revere was happy to be a craftsman.

"It was costly to have one's portrait painted, and very unusual to be painted without a gentleman's coat. Revere's descendants misunderstood this picture. They thought it made him look like a workman, and they hid it in the attic, but Revere is wearing an elaborate vest with gold buttons. The great expanse of bare sleeve - a fullness of flowing linen - makes a political statement. There was supposed to be no linen in America unless it was imported. The ladies of Boston objected to this, and in this very year they produced a hundred ells (about 125 yards) of linen. Revere is honoring this act of defiance, sporting a symbol of his country's freedom. The problem is the teapot, because tea was a burning issue. Only the Tories drank tea; the Whigs drank "Boston Tea," which was punch. Why does Revere hold a teapot? Is Copley deliberately trying to balance the Whiggish sleeve? Or was it Revere's own choice - to show off his skills as a silversmith? I see this picture as almost a confrontation between the two young men. Looking at Revere's solid, brooding face, I am not surprised that he won. Copley signed the portrait, but in letters so minuscule that hardly anyone could read them."

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Paul Revere Jr. (American, Boston, Massachusetts 1734–1818 Boston, Massachusetts)

ca. 1795

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

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Samuel Adams (1772) John Singleton Copley

Another of Copley’s Revolutionary sitters was Samuel Adams (1722-1803) the populist stirrerwhose writings from 1765 onward pointed the way to the Declaration of Independence. Adams would rise to become Governor of Massachusetts in the 1790’s, but Copley painted him in his firebrand days c. 1772 seen in the act of confronting Thomas Hutchinson, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts, over the Boston Massacre. (The portrait was commissioned, not by Adams, but by his friend the Whig merchant John Hancock- he of the signature. This portrait is much more expressive than the Revere. We see him, as it were, through Hutchinson’s eyes: a tight lipped “Jacobin”, all Calvinist fervor and republican principle, pointing with one rigid finger at the charter given the Massachusetts colony by William and Mary while gripping a screed of protest from the Boston citizens in the other hand. The drama of the image comes from the extreme contrast between Adams’ high lit hands and head and the darkness of his clothes and background. Samuel Adams is Copley’s only painting to show a political figure engaged in conflict. Even so, it is impossible to tell from it where Copley’s political sympathies lay: with the common citizenry that he came form and Adams spoke for, or with the Tories (including Copley’s own father-in-law) who detested Adams as a tribune of the ‘mob’. (Hughes 87)

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Boy with Squirrel (Henry Pelham), 1765, John Singleton Copley

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Nathaniel Hurd c. 1765. John Singleton Copley

The subject of this painting, Nathaniel Hurd, was an engraver and silversmith who is probably best remembered today for designing the seal of Harvard College. The portrait conveys a feeling of relaxed friendliness, and it's hard not to feel that Copley genuinely liked the sitter. The books resting beside Hurd's hands are ones he consulted in his work. The large one is Guillim's Display of Heraldry, to which Hurd often referred when he made bookplates or engraved silver vessels. In fact, the Cleveland Museum of Art owns a handsome silver teapot by Hurd, and the coat-of-arms on its face was probably copied from this very source.

This is Copley's first portrait to show a sitter in informal clothes. It's not surprising to learn that Hurd was a Patriot in the American Revolution and opposed to inherited wealth and privilege. No doubt he preferred to be shown in this informal way because he was a craftsman who worked with his hands. Notably, Hurd's large, expressive hands play a prominent role in the painting. Nonetheless, the fact that he surrounded himself with books makes it clear that he is not simply a manual worker, but a man of education and intelligence. Moreover, his gown is not really workman's attire, but the imported silk dressing gown of a wealthy aristocrat or merchant.

In the years before the American Revolution, Copley painted both Tories and Patriots, and struggled to remain politically neutral. By the mid 1770s, however, this balancing act had become extremely difficult, in part because Copley had married into a Tory family. (His father-in-law owned the tea that was dumped into Boston Harbor during the Boston Tea Party.) Political uncertainty also dried up much of Copley's patronage, since people of means became fearful that they would lose their wealth and unsure whether they would be able to remain in Boston. Consequently, in 1774 Copley left America for England, where he worked for the remainder of his career, achieving some success as a portrait and history painter and becoming a member of the Royal Academy, but often regretting that he had not stayed in his native country.

The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of the John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust 1915.534

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Nicholas Boylston (1767) John Singleton Copley

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Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin (1773) John Singleton Copley

Thomas Mifflin was a well-off young radical Whig of Quaker origins, a merchant who would become George Washington’s aide de camp and after the Revolution, the Governor of Pennsylvania. His wife, Sarah Morris, came from a distinguished Boston family. Their double portrait is very sober in color- browns, grays, and silver, the only bright note being a tiny red flower pinned to Mrs. Mifflin’s bodice. Neither of these young people is done up to the nines: Mifflin is at home, “in his own hair”, very unpretentious. What interests a modern eye is the relationship between man and wife that Copley recorded. Conventional 18^th c. portraiture had the wife looking admiringly at the husband, who looks at the viewer; the inferior deferring to the superior being. Not here: it is Sarah Mifflin who occupies the foreground and fixes us with a composed, level, and perhaps slightly interrogatory gaze while Thomas Mifflin looks at her with manifest pride and love that are however very far from proprietary complacency. It is a beautiful reflection of the Enlightenment idea about the necessary equality of man and wife in a voluntary contract. This feeling is underlined by subtle devices of Copley: Thomas Mifflin has been reading and he holds the book closed with a finger to mark the place. This creates a small wedge of white, where the pages show. Sarah Mifflin is weaving a fringe on a small mahogany hand loom. Its threads produce a similar triangle, a visual rhyme which subliminally equates her occupation and her self-improvement with his.

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John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin (Sarah Morris), 1773, oil on ticking, 156.5 × 121.9 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)

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William Vassall and His Son Leonard, ca. 1771�John Singleton Copley (1738-1815)�Oil on canvas, 49 7/8 x 40 7/8 in.

WILLIAM VASSALL AND HIS SON LEONARD Introduction

http://www.thinker.org/fam/education/publications/guide-american/slide-6.html

This portrait, also by John Singleton Copley, depicts William Vassall and his son Leonard. William Vassall was a wealthy Bostonian with land holdings in New England and Jamaica. Leonard, born in 1764, was William's fifth son, and the eldest child of William's second wife.

Discussion

Although he claimed to be politically neutral in the conflict with England, William Vassall's unwillingness to participate in revolutionary activities led many to assume that he was a loyalist to the British cause. Not taking a stand for independence meant siding with the English crown in the eyes of Boston's political leaders. When the British occupied Boston in 1774, the Vassall family tried to flee to their Rhode Island home and were pelted on the way by an angry mob.

Looking Closely

Compared to the painter of The Mason Children, Copley seems more concerned with showing the personality and presence of his subjects. This interest in the individual reflects the growing influence in America of European Enlightenment philosophy during the late eighteenth century. William and Leonard Vassal are posed casually, almost as if the viewer has interrupted a conversation between father and son; there is a more personal, intimate quality about this scene. The ideas of the Enlightenment also altered the public's perceptions of children, and this change can be seen in the differences between The Mason Children and William Vassal and His Son Leonard. Enlightenment philosophy saw a child as having a distinctly child-like mind -- a mind as a "blank slate" that needed to be filled by instruction. Leonard's clothing reflects the distinction between children and adults. Although what he wears is patterned after the sort of clothing his father wears, several details lend a playful, youthful quality to his clothing: the oversized gold buttons, the contrasting colors of waistcoat and vest, and the lighter colors of the clothing. Moreover, the action shown in the picture -- Leonard going to his father for help with something he is reading (suggested by the boy's gesture) -- portrays the father and son acting out their familial roles.

Style

Copley painted with a high degree of realism. The various surfaces and textures in the painting are rendered in fine detail: the laces, hair, shiny metal surfaces, and cloth are all convincingly painted. The wig powder that has fallen onto William Vassall's shoulders adds another realistic touch as well as a distinctive detail (and problem) of the era.

Artist

See entry for Mary Turner Sargent.

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Mordecai Gist, ca. 1774�Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827)�Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in.

MORDECAI GIST Introduction

http://www.thinker.org/fam/education/publications/guide-american/slide-7.html

Like William Vassall, Mordecai Gist came from a wealthy and prominent family; however, Gist chose to join the side of the American colonies in the fight for independence. This portrait of Gist was painted before the Revolutionary War when Gist was a wealthy sea captain and merchant. The significance of the sea to the colonies and to the new American Republic cannot be overestimated; the ocean was the highway and link between the Old World and the New, bringing to America not only goods and people, but also ideas and styles from Europe. Shortly after this picture was painted, Gist became famous for his exploits as an officer in the Revolutionary Army, particularly at the battles of Long Island and Germantown. He began the war as colonel of a Baltimore regiment which he helped to form; by 1779 he was a brigadier general. Gist was so devoted to the cause of liberty that he named his sons Independence and States!

Discussion

Why might Gist have made the decision to support the cause of American liberty? For one thing, Gist made his living from trade with Europe and other colonies. The duties from the Navigation Acts and other English attempts at taxation were keenly felt by people in his line of work. Economic interest became a divisive factor between colonists who supported England, those who remained neutral, and those who advocated independence. Vassall may have profited from trade, but his income was largely derived from land holdings; he was therefore less affected directly by England's tax laws than was Gist and this may have been a factor in Vassall's ambivalence during the war. Even harder for the revolutionaries to understand, was the loyalty so many colonists felt towards England. While those who favored independence felt oppressed by England's rule, other colonists felt protected by England against the vast unknown lands of America beyond the frontier.

Looking Closely

The lace collar and cuffs Gist wears in his portrait, his gold-embroidered suit and hat, and the elaborately-carved chair in which he sits, would have informed eighteenth century viewers of Gist's success as a businessman. His connection to the sea is made evident by the dividers he holds in his hands, the sea chart on the table, the book of Euclid's Geometry, and the ship sailing toward the horizon. Gist's long black ponytail wrapped in silk was a hairstyle worn by high-ranking sailors of the period. One can imagine Gist walking down the street in the company of his merchant friends who were not sailors, easily distinguishable from them by his long ponytail. Clothing is still used today as a way of communicating a person's interests and allegiances (green hair, body piercing, and torn jeans worn today send very different messages than a gray pinstripe suit). In the eighteenth century the messages of clothes were much more specific -- so much so that most people never had to confront the issue of "what" to wear, only which suit of clothes. A person's social rank, wealth, and the nature of the occasion dictated particular clothing.

Style

The brown tones of this painting and the direct gaze of the sitter bear a resemblance to the style used by Copley in his portrait of William Vassall, but Peale did not convey the illusion of depth as convincingly as did Copley.

Artist

Charles Willson Peale was one of the most accomplished and versatile men of the early republic. An artist, naturalist, soldier and teacher, he was also the founder of one of the country's first museums. As a young man Peale was apprenticed to a saddle maker and by age twenty he advertised as a clock maker, silversmith, and sign painter. A group of supporters sent him to England in 1767 to study painting. Upon his return he earned a good living as a portraitist in his native Baltimore before moving to Philadelphia. Eventually Peale turned his portrait business over to his sons and brother and devoted his time to his museum. In this capacity he oversaw the excavation of the first nearly-complete mastodon skeleton in 1805.

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Mrs. McCurdy and Her Daughters, Mary Jane and Letitia �Joshua Johnson (1763-1830)�Oil on canvas, 41 x 34 1/2 in.

LETITIA GRACE MCCURDY Introduction

http://www.thinker.org/fam/education/publications/guide-american/slide-8.html

This painting of a young girl was created by Joshua Johnson, the first African-American portrait painter known to historians. This portrait represents Letitia Grace McCurdy, the daughter of Hugh and Grace McCurdy of Baltimore, Maryland. Born in 1797, Letitia was probably four or five years old when this portrait was made.

Discussion

Joshua Johnson is the first African-American artist we know of who appears to have been educated as a painter. There were many African-Americans in the United States who were trained as blacksmiths, glassblowers, and carpenters, among other trades. Some African-Americans taught themselves painting or continued African artistic traditions like sculpture. But in the American culture of the early eighteenth century, a portrait painter was perceived differently than other kinds of artists. Hiring someone to paint a portrait required that the artist spend a lot of time with the subject. It also called for trust on the part of the patron that the artist would present the subject on canvas in a way that was acceptable to that patron and the patron's peers. In the case of Joshua Johnson and his patrons, this suggests that there were individuals in Maryland (a slave state) who were willing to let a former slave participate, to some degree, in their culture. Johnson never fully participated in the social world of his patrons, but he was accepted enough to be able to convey certain details of their society on canvas.

Some of the people who commissioned portraits from Joshua Johnson were aware of his race. This painting was passed down through several generations of Letitia's descendants along with a story that it was painted by an artist from the West Indies (the Caribbean). While the narrative may have become confused in the intervening years, the fact that Letitia told her children and their descendants that her portrait was painted by a man of African descent indicates how unusual it was.

Looking Closely

Letitia's dress -- a high-waisted frock fastened with a drawstring -- reflects French fashion from the period. After the French Revolution, French women began to wear simple, unadorned dresses to reflect the ideals of the classless society that the revolutionaries tried to establish. In America these kinds of dresses were more associated with fashion than politics. However, a similarly dressed young female, representing liberty, appears on American coins and public statuaries of the period and has a direct connection to the French political origins of egalitarian clothing. The tucked hem of Letitia's dress is heavy with fabric so it can be lengthened as "young liberty" grows. Letitia wears a necklace woven from hair that ends in a gold chain that may have included a nameplate. Hair jewelry was a common mourning custom in the United States until the early twentieth century. Often made by the person who would wear it, the jewelry was braided from the hair of a loved one who had died. Letitia's necklace may memorialize her father who died in 1805.

Style

Letitia, like Mary Turner Sargent, is posed in a fictitious architectural setting. The strange appearance of her dog (the tail, the rabbit ears, the human eyes) suggests that he too, is imaginary.

Artist

Joshua Johnson was the son of a slave mother and a Caucasian father named George Johnson. It is believed that shortly before his death, George Johnson purchased his son's freedom. Some Baltimore city directories (a pre-telephone version of the phone book) from the time during which Joshua Johnson worked, list him as a "free man of color;" others make no reference to his race. Free black people were relatively common in the northern United States during this period. While they certainly did not enjoy all of the privileges of Caucasian citizens, it seems that many, like Joshua Johnson, were able to practice a trade, work in business, or farm as tenant farmers. We do not know how Johnson learned to paint. In a newspaper advertisement of 1798, Johnson may have been alluding to the difficulties of a black man getting an artistic education when he wrote:

As a self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art and having experienced many insufferable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies, it is highly gratifying to him to make assurances of his ability to execute all commands with an effect and style that give fascination.

Joshua Johnson (active 1796-1824) is the earliest African-American painter in the United States with a recognized body of work. Johnson (whose name is sometimes spelled Johnston) was brought to Baltimore in the 1790s as a slave for a family that was related to Charles Willson Peale, the celebrated portrait painter. Within a decade Johnson became a "freeman of color" and was earning his living as a portrait painter. Although early works show Peale's influence, Johnson soon developed a more personal and less academic style, in which facial features were idealized, while details such as fine lace overlaying another fabric received a very literal treatment. Johnson's affinity for bright, strong colors and precise details can be seen in the portrait of Edward and Sarah Rutter, whose air of stillness gives it an unreal, almost magical feeling.

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Quobna Ottobah Cugoano

Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, usually known by the shorter form Ottobah Cugoano, was born in present-day Ghana in the 1750s. Kidnapped and taken into slavery, he worked on plantations in Granada before being brought to England, where he obtained his freedom. He was baptised as 'John Stuart' in 1773, a name he continued to use over the next fifteen years, during which time he worked as a servant to the artist Richard Cosway. While working for Cosway he wrote his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Commerce of the Human Species, the first directly abolitionist publication in English by an African, which was published in 1787. In London, he was a friend of Olaudah Equiano, and a neighbour of Ignatius Sancho. After publishing his work, he dropped out of the historical record, and we do not know where, when, or how he died. His work; part autobiography, part political treatise, and part Christian exegesis, has an enduring legacy as the first substantial anti-slavery text written in English by an African.

http://www.brycchancarey.com/cugoano/index.htm

•An Annotated Bibliography of Cugoano Studies

•Extracts from the Thoughts and Sentiments

•Cugoano is Kidnapped and Sold into Slavery

•Cugoano Calls for a Righteous Empire

•Links and Web Resources for Cugoano

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Reubens Peale With A Geranium (1801) Rembrandt Peale

Rembrandt Peale’s most memorable painting was a portrait of his younger brother Rubens with a geranium. His image of Rubens is an enchanting rendition of the meaning of their city’s name- Philadelphia, “brotherly love”. For despite his name, Rubens was half-blind. He sits for his brother, looking sweet, mild, myopic, gazing over the metal frame of his spectacles and holding another pair of glasses in his hands on the table. (Bifocal lenses were unknown then; one needed two pairs of spectacles, one for close and the other for distant looking.) He is the young scholar sharing the painting on equal terms with the object of his study. The geranium is as big as he is and recieves as much scrutiny; it is not treated as a mere emblem of ruben Peale’s botanical interests. Thus it goes against the grain of American portraiture of the time. Its palette is somber, dark brown, warm terra-cotta, and green, with a spark or two of red from the flowers, that are just beginning to bloom. It surely reflects Peale’s vision of his brother’s personality and potential.

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The Artist in his Museum (1822) Charles Willson Peale

Charles Willson Peale was the rpecursor to Disney: he set out to invent the American Museum. Its seed lay in Peale’s desire to create a public gallery off his portraits of Great Men, the Revolution’s heros. This did not attractthe public Peale had hoped for, and by 1787 he had started adding stuffed American birds and animals to the display. As the project turned and expanded in Peale’s mind, his purpose became nothing less than “to bring into one view a world in miniature”- a synoptic representation of that world, applying Enlightenment principles of sorting, classification and naming to its fascinating chaos and abundance. He was, in short, creating America’s first encyclopedic museum.

Into it went everything from pre-Cambrian fossils to stuffed humming-birds and wolves. Peale had top shoot his own specimens and teach himself taxidermy, with stinking and nearly fatal results, since he used arsenic dust to preserve the creatures from moths and mold. He displayed in lifelike poses in dioramas he made and painted himself: gophers peering from mounds of real eart, snakes coiled around real branches. He read Linnaeus, and used his new system of classification.

He said, “As this is an age of discovery, every experiment that brings to light the properties of natural substances helps to expand the mind and make men better, more virtuous and liberal; and , what is of infinite importance in our country, creates a fondness for finding treasure contained in the bowels of the earth that might otherwise be lost.”

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The Exhumation of the Mastodon (1806-08) Charles Willson Peale

The most extraordinary of these buried treasures was found in 1801, when some farm workers digging in a marl pit near Newsburgh New York unearthed some enormous bones. The locals hauled out as many as they could and displayed them in a barn; before long the news of this prodigy reached Peale in Philadelphia, and he rushed to the site with his son Rembrandt. He found the pit flooded by heavy rains and underground seepage, but the “pleasure…almost tempted me to strip off my clothes and dive to the bottom to feel for bones.” (Peale was then sixty.) He bought the excavation rights form the farmer. He borrowed $500 to hire diggers. He got his friend Thomas Jefferson, now the 3^rd President of the United States, to lend him a wheel driven, bucket-chain pump from Navy stores to bail out the pit. Bone by fossil bone, against every imaginable difficulty, the giant creature was extracted. It proved to be a mastodon– the first complete skeleton of such a creature to be found in America. Before long the Peales unearthed a second mastodon skeleton on a farm nearby.

Today, every child knows about fossils. But two hundred years ago, the idea of an extinct species had scarcely even been formulated. People were apt to assume that the world’s creatures had remained in fixed form since God created them, and that their catalogue had remained essentially the same since the time of Noah. Peale’s mastodon, therefore, presented thinkers with a considerable challenge. It implied a new conception of geological time, pushing back the limits of paleohistory. Europeans might deride America for having nothing old in it. But this loxodont was older than the Parthenon. More ancient than the Pyramids, and as enduring. When its bones were carted back to Philadelphia and assembled standing up in Peale’s museum, Rembrandt Peale gave a dinner party under the towering ribcage. The guests drank a toast to all Americans: “May they be as preeminent among all the nations of the world as the canopy we sit beneath surpasses the fabric of a mouse.”

Hughes 99-100

The painting itself depicts a moment of crisis in the pit, when sudden rain storms threatened to bury the creature again in water and mud. Its dominant image is the water bailing engine and the pyramid of poles that supports its machinery. We ses the men in the treadmill, turning the great wheel and its drive belt; the endless chain of buckets; the wooden flume that carries off the water; the young men with poles holding down the lower free wheeling axe of the bucket chain; and in the pit, a buzz of wet activity and a half-naked worker triumphantly holding up a mastodon bone, showing it to Peale. Peale with his children unfurls an enormous drawing- like a cartoon for some future fresco of paleobiology-- of the mastodon’s leg. To the extreme right is The Man with the Ax, the standard emblem of American progress and expansion.

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Watson and the Shark, 1778. John Singleton Copley

Brooke Watson, an orphan who became a director of the Bank of England, was a wholly self-made man, and he regarded his life as a triumph over adversity. Born in 1735, he had been sent to Boston as a child under the wing of a relative named Levens who had, as the phrase went, ‘interests’ in the Caribbean- chiefly in tea and slaves. He was fourteen, and in the crew of one of Levens’ ships in Cuba when the incident happened.

As the craft rode at anchor in Havana Harbor, Watson went swimming over the side. He was about two hundred yards from the ship when a shark attacked him and dragged him under. The crew of the ship’s launch, which was waiting to take the captain to shore, cast off and rowed frantically toward the spot where the boy disappeared. They saw him surface, disappear again, and bob up for a second time. The shark was making its third run at Watson when the crew drove it off with a boat hook and pulled the mauled boy over the gunwale. Miraculously--Watson’s right leg was first stripped to the bone from the calf down, and then bitten off near the ankle– the lad survived, though the ship’s surgeon had to amputate below the knee.

Watson in later life thought of this as providential. He had been snatched, literally, from the jaws of death, thus enacting one of the commonest tropes in the literature of religious salvation. He was the errant soul saved form the Devil; he was Jonah delivered from the whale. His life turned. Crippled, he would go no longer to sea. He became a merchant, and a very successful one, making a fortune from the unusual goods of the Triangle trade: slaves and slaving supplies, rum, sugar. When Watson dies, he left Copley’s painting to the Christ’s Hospital in London, a charity school for orphans and poor children….

The originality of Watson and the Shark: its composition is a triangle, the base formed by the shark and Watson, the apex supplied by the head of the black crewman who stands in the launch, one hand extended in a gesture of amazement,the other holding a line which trails over Watson’s arm. The black sailor’s outstretched arm parallels Watson’s white arm rising form the water. For the first time an American artist depicted a black man on equal terms of will and action with whites, without the slightest tone of demeaning caricature. This would not happen again for nearly a century– in the paintings of Winslow Homer. He is as striking, full, and dignified a presence as the black castaway who acts as a similarly climactic figure in Gericault’s image of maritime terror, The Raft of the Medusa. Who was the model? No one knows. It may have been a servant- for which read ‘slave’- in Copley’s own household, though no record of such a person exists.

Art historians, seeking a political meaning for the the image, have claimed that Watson and the Shark is a polemic against slavery. But this is unprovable, since we know nothing of Copley’s views on slavery and Watson was not only pro-slavery but profited greatly from the slave trade- (he brokered shipments of “refuse food”, low grade, reject salt cod) to Caribbean planters as slave-food in exchange for rum. It has been suggested that Watson’s severed leg symbolized the loss of trade that would follow American independence from Britain. Maybe not.

(Hughes 91-93)

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The Death of General Wolfe, 1770. Benjamin West (1738-1820)

The picture which made Benjamin West famous in London was The Death of General Wolfe, which he completed in 1770, to a storm of applause, at the Royal Academy. It was a history painting, butt of a kind not seen before. Its story had unfolded only a decade earlier. It told of recent imperial glory: the British army defeating the French at the battle for Quebec, in September 1759. At the height of the battle, the British commander, Major General James Wolfe, was shot in the belly and slowly died. He lived long enough to learn that the French were on the run; his last words were, “Now, God be praised, I will die in peace.”

West divided his painting into three groups. At the center Wolfe lies on the ground in the classical posture of the dying hero, his eyes turned upward, his concerned and grieving officers forming an arch above him which culminates in a billowing standard whose skyward thrust indicates the impending trajectory of his soul. It also reminds one of the empty cross in a Deposition, linking Wolfe’s body to the image of the sacrificed Christ.

The main figure in the left group is his second in command, Brigadier General Robert Monckton, is arm in a sling from a wound received in combat; with him are three officers, an American ranger scout (in the green coat and ornaments of Indian beadwork) who points dramatically backward and is bringing the news of the French retreat, and a pensive Indian squatting on the ground. On the right are two more figures, an English grenadier officer and his servant, wringing their hands at Wolfe’s death. The grenadier’s abandonment to grief is stressed by his embroidered hat, which has fallen unremarked to the ground while his long hair blows distractedly in the wind.

West went to great trouble with the details of the uniform and the weaponry, and he may have interviewed some of the identifiable figures, most of whom were still alive in 1770. Why, then, was The Death of General Wolfe so controversial and, in the end, so influential? Why did he change then English sense of decorum in heroic commemoration, the idea of what modern history painting could do?

Because it was “modern”, late 18^th c. dress. Heroes required togas and other accoutrements of Antiquity; swords and javelins, not muskets and bayonets. Word of West’s departure form this norm reached George III even as he was working on the painting, and the King warned that “it was thought very ridiculous to exhibit heroes in coats, breeches and cock’d hats.” Reynolds came to his studio and tried to convince West that “the classic costume of antiquity” was to be preferred to the “modern garb of war”, even when the subject was modern war. The American’s retort was to become famous. “The event to be commemorated,” he replied, “took place on the 13^th of September 1759, in a region of the world unknown to the Greeks and Romans, and a t a period of time when no such nations, nor heroes in their costumes, any longer existed…. The same truth that guides the pen of the historian should govern the pencil of the artist… but if, instead of the facts of the transaction, I represent classical fictions, how shall I be understood by posterity. I want to mark the date, the place, and the parties engaged in the event.”

There spoke the natural man from the New World, pragmatic, realistic. Yet The Death of General Wolfe is very far from “the facts of the transaction” ten years before. If not a classical fiction, it is certainly a modern one. Thus none of the officers who can be recognized in the painting, not even Monckton, were with West when he died– they were all busy, or lying wounded, on other parts of the confused battlefield. No American Indian was there, because none served with the British at Quebec; West’s Indian is probably best understood as representing “natural nobility” pondering the nobility of Anglo-Christian, civilized sacrifice. Interestingly, West would later drop his documentary-truth defense of The Death of General Wolfe, which had become an icon by then anyway. “Wolfe would not die like a common soldier under a Bush,” he declared. The painting should be “proportioned to the highest idea conceived of the hero… A mere matter of fact will never produce this effect.”

Hughes (74-76)