Boston 1775: Benjamin West

Showing posts with label Benjamin West. Show all posts

Monday, July 28, 2025

A Hero of Lake George

The Battle of Lake George on 8 Sept 1755 probably involved fewer than 3,500 men, a little more on the British side than the French. Each commander reported that his force had faced a much larger foe, however.

Each commander also reported inflicting more casualties than his force suffered, and more casualties than the rival commander reported. In fact, it seems impossible to pinpoint the number of dead and wounded.

Both sides lost leaders, however. On the French side, Baron Dieskau was wounded and captured, and Canadian commandant Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre was killed. The British lost Col. Ephraim Williams and Mohawk ally Hendrick Theyanoguin. Among the provincial officers who died of their wounds was Capt. William Maginnis of New York.

Gen. William Johnson was wounded early in the fighting near Lake George and had to sit out the rest of the battle. Not that he mentioned the last detail in his report to the Crown. Nor did he name Col. Phineas Lyman as the officer who took over and completed that part of the fight. But of course Johnson portrayed the battle as a great victory for Britain.

It probably was a British victory, though limited and costly. Crown forces could now move safely from Fort Lyman to Lake George, and the lakefront was clear enough to build another fort there.

But that clash was an even bigger win for William Johnson, Britain’s liaison to the Iroquois and new provincial general. He was made a baronet, thus Sir William Johnson. Eventually Benjamin West painted Johnson nobly sparing a French officer from attack by a Native warrior, as shown above.

The new baronet returned the king’s favor, renaming the nearby landmarks for the royal family: Lac du Saint-Sacrement became Lake George after George II, Fort Lyman became Fort Edward after one of the king’s grandsons (another slight for Phineas Lyman), and the new fort was dubbed Fort William Henry after the king’s younger son and another grandson. Since the territory remained in British hands, those names prevail.

As the senior (and surviving) British captain in the last part of this battle, Nathaniel Folsom enjoyed some of that glory. He rose within the New Hampshire military establishment, ranked as a colonel within a couple of years. Folsom’s businesses in Exeter prospered.

In 1774 the province chose Nathaniel Folsom as a representative to the First Continental Congress, alongside John Sullivan. His son, Nathaniel, Jr., participated in the first raid on Fort William and Mary that December. Decades later a veteran named Gideon Lamson stated (using military titles the men acquired later):

At nine, Colonel [John] Langdon came to Stoodley’s and acquainted General Folsom and company with the success of the enterprise,—that General Sullivan was then passing up the river with the loaded boats of powder and cannon.

Folsom took charge of one barrel of gunpowder removed from the fort.

Given Nathaniel Folsom’s success in the last war, his support for the Patriot resistance, and his activity in the New Hampshire Provincial Congress, it’s no surprise that that body voted to make him commander of the province’s troops on 21 Apr 1775. The legislators reaffirmed that decision on 23 May.

The problem was that no one had checked with the officer who was actually leading the New Hampshire troops around Boston.

TOMORROW: Stark divide.

Sunday, November 17, 2024

More Light from the Portrait of Francis Williams

Earlier in the month I reported on Fara Dabhoiwala’s work on the portrait of Francis Williams based on two news articles.

I’ve now read Prof. Dabhoiwala’s own article in the London Review of Books, and he has even more to say.

About the painter:

The only oil painter known to have been active in Jamaica during these years was an Anglo-American artist called William Williams, who was then in his early thirties. This Williams, the son of an ordinary mariner, had been born in Bristol in 1727. He’d always loved to draw. Sent to sea as a youth, he abandoned his crew in Virginia and spent a few years knocking around the West Indies and Central America, sometimes living among Indians, learning their language and trying his luck as a painter for the local colonists.

Eventually, around 1747, he ended up in Philadelphia, where he worked for a theatre, painting sets and backdrops, and in a boatyard, painting ships, as well as doing sign-painting and lettering, teaching music, writing poetry and composing what is now regarded as the first American novel.

Though he was entirely self-taught, he also made landscapes and portraits; he collected engravings; he used a camera obscura as a drawing aid; he studied the lives of the great artists and wanted to be one himself. He was the earliest teacher of the young Benjamin West, who…in the 1770s commemorated his old mentor by including his likeness in one of his monumental historical canvases.

William Williams kept a list of every painting he ever made. The original doesn’t survive, but in the 19th century someone jotted down a summary of it. In the spring of 1760, Williams travelled from Philadelphia to Jamaica to offer his services as an artist. His list recorded that during his months in Jamaica, he painted 54 pictures. None of these has ever been found. I am confident that the portrait of Francis Williams is one of them.

There is in fact a scientific test that could prove this, because it has recently been discovered that William Williams prepared his canvases with a distinctive and very unusual triple layer of underpainting. I’m pressing the V&A [Victoria & Albert Museum] to undertake this new test as soon as possible.

Dabhoiwala also posits that the painting depicts not only the page in Newton’s Principia showing how to calculate the path of a comet but Halley’s comet itself. I’m not entirely convinced by this because the visual clues aren’t distinct. Then again, neither are comets a lot of the time. And the painter was definitely charting something in that portion of the canvas:

We can see that on the infrared scans of the picture. When William Williams made his first pencilled marks on this canvas, to plot the composition, he carefully ruled a series of lines to show where that white object in the sky should go – and to mark its relation to the constellations he was told to paint below. His sitter made sure of that, as he made sure of every other carefully placed detail in his portrait.

The portrait of Francis Williams is the only painting ever made of Halley’s comet in 1759, on its momentous first predicted return.

Monday, August 15, 2022

The Memory of Gen. Simon Fraser

Brigadier general Simon Fraser had a long career in the British army before dying in the Battle of Saratoga.

Even so, it appears that Gen. John Burgoyne’s description of his funeral, quoted back here, made Fraser into a British icon of sorts.

Burgoyne’s efforts were helped along by another narrative of that event in Lt. Thomas Anburey’s Travels Through the Interior Parts of America, published in 1789. Anburey wrote:

About sun-set, the corpse was carried up the hill; the procession was in view of both armies; as it passed by Generals Burgoyne, [William] Phillips and Riedesel, they were struck at the plain simplicity of the parade, being only attended by the officers of his suite…and urged by a natural wish to pay the last honors to him, in the eyes of the whole army, they joined the procession.

The enemy, with an inhumanity peculiar to Americans, cannonaded the procession as it passed, and during the service over the grave. The account given me by your friend Lieut. [Quin John] Freeman was, that there appeared an expressive mixture of sensibility and indignation upon every countenance—the scene must have been affecting.

Anburey spent years as a prisoner of war with the Convention Army—that was how he traveled through the interior parts of America. He didn’t come away with any fondness for the host nation.

In the same year Anburey’s account was published, a print appeared on the London market titled “View of the West Bank of the Hudson’s River, 3 Miles above Still Water, Upon which is the Army under the Command of Lt. Gen. Burgoyne (Showing General Frazer’s Funeral).”

Follow this link to a digitized image of this print from the Yale University Art Gallery. On the rightmost of the three hills is a line of tiny figures following two coffins. Some experts interpret the second one as representing Burgoyne’s aide-de-camp Sir Francis Clarke, also killed in the battle though not in any account buried with Fraser.

Finally in 1791 the Scottish artist John Graham (1754–1817) exhibited a painting of Fraser’s funeral. Graham was influenced by Benjamin West’s picture of the death of Gen. James Wolfe in 1759. So much so, in fact, that one critic of the time reviewed The Funeral of General Fraser by saying: “We should have been more pleased with the picture if we had not seen The Death of General Wolfe by West.”

As West had done before him (and as other West acolytes like John Singleton Copley and John Trumbull did), Graham sought out the officers who had been at the event he was depicting. He made studies of those men and portrayed them as individuals in his scene. That painting was made into a print in 1794, and the print was issued with a key to the figures.

(I can’t find Graham’s original on the web; the image above shows a copy in the collection of the National Army Museum.)

Burgoyne, Anburey, and Graham thus crafted Fraser’s funeral into an emblem of British fortitude and propriety even in defeat. This stuff-upper-lip behavior could easily, as Don Carleton commented last week, tip into Monty Python–style satire. Still, it was effective.

American chroniclers of the Battle of Saratoga felt a need to quote Riedesel and Burgoyne on Fraser’s death and metal—those sources are just too full of drama to ignore. But the same historians often added a protest that if only the British commanders had told the Americans that the generals were gathering for a funeral there would have been no artillery fire. I’m not entirely convinced.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

A Closer Look at the Gages

The main thrust of the American Revolution Institute blog posting I pointed to yesterday concerns the subject of the engraving titled “The Hero returned from Boston.”

This print says it was published in London on 7 Sept 1776 by Thomas Hart. Hart didn’t exist, the image bears signs of having been produced in Augsburg, and there’s probably no way to confirm the date.

Regardless, someone went to the trouble of engraving this picture of a woman, her gown flowing and one breast bared, kissing a gentleman holding a sword. Which meant someone believed there would be public demand for such a print. And it all had something to do with Boston around 1776.

The blog post posits:

The man in the print bears a casual resemblance to General Thomas Gage as portrayed by John Singleton Copley in 1768. Gage had commissioned the portrait and when it was complete, sent it home to England. “The Generals Picture was received at home with universal applause,” one of Gage’s aides [John Small] reported to Copley in 1770, “and Looked on by real good Judges as a Masterly performance. It is placed in one of the Capital Apartments of Lord Gage’s house in Arlington Street.”

Gage then commissioned a portrait of his wife, Margaret. Copley painted her in an unusual pose and garments, probably evoking her family roots in eastern Europe. The blog post elaborates:

Part of the attraction of turquerie was that it was sexually suggestive without being lewd. In Copley’s portrait Mrs. Gage is not wearing a corset and reclines in her loose fitting clothes. Copley called it “beyond Compare the best Lady’s portrait I ever Drew.” Proud of the portrait, the Gages packed it off to London, where it created a mild sensation when it was displayed.

In January 1773, Benjamin West told Copley: “the portrait of Mrs Gage as a picture has received every praise from the lovers of arts. her Friends did not think the likeness so favourable as they could wish, but Honour’d it as a pice of art.”

Thus, people in London had seen and discussed the Gages’ portraits. They had seen the Gages themselves in 1774, when the general assured King George III that he could bring Massachusetts back under control. They had followed the news from Boston as the conflict got worse. They had seen Gov. Gage return defeated after the outbreak of war and the costly Battle of Bunker Hill, his wife preceding him by a few weeks.

I find that interpretation of “The Hero returned from Boston” as a lampoon of the Gages convincing. In addition to the points in the blog post, the man in the print grips his sword the same way Copley’s general grips his cane. The engraver didn’t show Gage in uniform, but that might have been a satirical step too far, and Gage no longer had a military command, anyway.

The last section of the blog post discusses the supposition that Margaret Gage sympathized with the rebels and even disclosed her husband’s plans to them. Ultimately the author discards that idea (citing some of my own writing on the subject). Along the way the essay acknowledges counterarguments, however, and this passage caught my eye:

A local guest at one of the Gage’s parties attended by British officers wrote in June 1775 that “Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family . . . Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being too loyal to her husband’s party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside.”

I didn’t recognize that quotation. Had I missed a source so close to Gage? I had to track this “local guest” down. And here’s what I found.

That’s not a contemporaneous statement from someone who socialized with the Gages. Rather, the historian Henry ~~Bentley~~ Belcher wrote those words in The First American Civil War, published in 1911, summarizing how he perceived rumors and leaks swirling around the Gage household.

What’s the source of that misinterpretation? In 2016 Deborah Gage wrote on the website for Firle Castle, the Gage family seat:

It has long been rumoured that Margaret provided Dr. [Joseph] Warren with the information that the British troops would be moving out the evening of April 19th, 1774 bound for Lexington and Concord, for example as cited in this letter written by Dr. Belcher in June 1775 ‘Entertainment at Providence House, where Madam Gage presided with the social adroitness and tact of a lady of a high New Jersey family, were crowded with uniformed men from both fleet and camp. Yet suspicion attended this lady as not being too loyal to her husband’s party and to the King. It was hinted that the Governor was uxorious, and had no secrets from his wife, who passed word to the spies swarming outside. At any rate whatever was designed in Boston was, it is alleged, known within an hour or two at Medford, at Roxbury, at Cambridge, at Brookline and in every Boston tavern.’

That quotation introduced some big errors. The governor’s mansion, Province House, became “Providence House.” ~~Dr. Henry Bentley became “Dr. Belcher.”~~ And, most important, a statement by a historian in 1911 was put into the pen of someone in 1775.

Thursday, November 18, 2021

A King of Bath Stone and Coade Stone

Here’s a news story from London that caught my eye a couple of days ago and made me go digging for more detail.

This statue representing Alfred the Great stands outside Trinity Square Church in the borough of Southwark. At one point people thought that it or part of it was a medieval sculpture salvaged from an old church.

That would put Alfred among the contenders for the oldest outdoor statue in the British capital. Considering London’s smog problem in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it must have weathered a lot.

Recently a team of conservators led by Dr. Kevin Hayward and Prof. Martin Henig studied the statue and announced that it is both younger and much older than people thought.

That team concluded that the lower part of the statue was originally carved from Bath stone to make a sculpture of the Roman goddess Minerva. Its style is typical of the early second century, around the time of the emperor Hadrian. When complete, that statue was about ten feet tall.

The upper part of the statue, including the chest, arms, head, and cloak that hangs down around the legs, wasn’t carved at all. It was molded in Coade stone, a mix of clay, terracotta, silicates, and glass fired in a very hot kiln for four days.

That process shrinks what the sculptors molded from that clay mixture, so making the top part of Alfred fit so well on the ancient stone bottom required expert calculations and manufacture.

Here’s where the eighteenth century fits in. The inventor of Coade stone was Eleanor Coade (1733-1821), a London businesswoman. Her father was a Baptist wool merchant in Exeter. Perhaps more importantly, her maternal grandmother, the widow Sarah Enchmarch, ran a very successful textile business from 1735 to 1760. After Eleanor’s father went bankrupt, the Coade family moved to London, and she set up her own business selling linen.

In 1769, Eleanor Coade bought Daniel Pincot’s artificial stone factory in Lambeth, keeping him as the manager. Two years later Coade found Pincot “representing himself as the chief proprietor,” so she fired him and promoted a sculptor named John Bacon to supervise the works.

Coade appears to have improved the formula for artificial stone. And she kept that formula secret; Coade stone wasn’t replicated until the 1990s. She also improved the line of products the company offered, exhibiting sculpture and ornamental goods at the Society of Artists in the 1770s. Among the designers Coade worked with was Benjamin West.

The Coade Artificial Stone Manufactory’s statuary and molded ornaments proved to be long-lasting. It offered designs to fit with the fashionable neoclassical style of architecture. In 1780 Coade landed a royal commission from George III to decorate a chapel at Windsor Castle, so she could boast a royal endorsement as well.

After Bacon’s death in 1799, Coade took on male cousins as her junior partners. She never married. In her will she left bequests to several female friends, stipulating that money would be their property independent of their husbands.

It’s not clear when the King Alfred statue was produced; the earliest record of its presence at the church is from 1831, so the Coade company might have produced it after Eleanor Coade’s death. There’s a Roman archeological site nearby, so one possibility is that the Georgian-period sculptors found the Minerva lower body, assumed it was from a medieval church, and produced the quasi-medieval statue of King Alfred to make the body whole again.

Thursday, March 25, 2021

Henry Pelham and History Painting

While Henry Pelham’s picture of the Boston Massacre is often analyzed as a political cartoon, I suspect he was aiming for something more akin to a history painting.

British artists considered history painting—portraying a dramatic moment from history, myth, religious scripture, or even a theatrical play—as one of the highest forms of visual art at this time. In 1760 the Society of Artists of Great Britain started to award annual “premiums,” or large prizes, for paintings of subjects from British history.

At first those British history paintings were from the distant past. Robert Edge Pine won a premium in 1763 for a picture of King Canute and his mother, for instance. But there was interest in showing show more recent history, too.

Benjamin West’s first history paintings showed scenes from classical times, but in 1768 he painted a British general magnanimously saving a French prisoner, and in 1770, the same year as the Massacre, he went all out with a large canvas of the death of Gen. James Wolfe, shown in modern dress with recognizable living men around him.

In West’s first letter to John Singleton Copley in June 1767, he explained that he had been too busy to write before because “history Painting…demands the greates Cear and intelehance in History amaginable.” In that letter West offered advice about manipulating color and light to draw viewers’ eyes to the most important figures in a picture:

Thare is in Historical Painting this Same attention to be Paid. For if the Principl Carrictors are Suffred to Stand in the Croud, and not distinguished by light and shadow, or made Conspicuous by some Pece of art, So that the Eye is first Caut by the Head Carrictor of the History, and So on to the next as he bears Proportion to the Head Carrictor, if this is not observed the whole is Confusion and looses that dignity we So much admier in Great works.

Copley was Henry Pelham’s older half-brother and mentor as an artist. Compare the advice he received from West with how Pelham kept Capt. Thomas Preston’s head on the right of his image in the foreground against white space while the soldiers recede into smoke. Likewise on the left, victims’ faces stand out while much of the crowd is in shadow. Pelham used hatching to darken the background figures.

We don’t know if Copley shared West’s advice with Pelham, but we do know the half-brothers discussed history painting when Copley was first viewing art in Europe and Pelham was trying to emulate his career in Boston. “My Dear Harry,” Copley wrote to from Paris in September 1774, “as you proceed invent Historical Subjects. possess Sr. Josa. Renolds lectures as soon as you can,—some of the Book Dealers will send for them for you—and they will tell you how to proceed in the management of those great Subjects.”

In the spring of 1775 Copley wrote, “You will be glad to know in what manner a Historical composition is made, so I will give it to you, in that way I have found best myself to proceed.” He then went on for several pages.

Reaching Italy in June 1775, Copley wrote, “you should than (as I would have you) sketch any Historical Subject. . . . I don’t think a Man a perfect Artist who on occation cannot Paint History, and who knows but you have a talent in history like Raphael till you try; and if you have, your fortune is secure in this Life.”

Of course, being a history painter was Copley’s own ambition. He felt frustrated at how his American customers wanted portraits only. After settling in Britain, Copley put a lot of time and energy into creating magnificent scenes of the British army winning parts of the American War far from America.

Now I’m not saying that Henry Pelham’s 1770 Boston Massacre image was a history painting. It’s not a painting at all, of course. In Britain, West still had to argue the case that it was valid to treat a recent event in that high-brow fashion. But Pelham’s picture has more in common with that artistic genre than with contemporaneous political prints, which usually take place on a generic and often blank landscape, feature allegorical figures, and sometimes use unrealistic techniques like word balloons.

With the exception of the dog in the center foreground, no elements in Pelham’s painting are wholly symbolic or unreal. And even the dog isn’t vomiting, urinating, or doing the other distasteful things that dogs often did in political cartoons. Pelham reserved his symbolic imagery for the bottom margin, where he etched a skull and crossbones and lightning shattering a sword.

Analyzing Pelham’s print as akin to a history painting doesn’t mean treating it as an attempt to depict the shooting on King Street exactly as it happened. Artists composed their history paintings for emotional and polemical effect, as West’s advice reveals. But they did so less obviously than when they drew cartoons.

As Paul Revere copied Pelham’s image, he added the label “Butcher’s Hall” to the Customs House, thus inserting a fictional label into the scene to hammer home its political message. That moved the picture closer to cartoon form. Even then, the result was a long way from Revere’s “View of the Year 1765,” “A Warm Place—Hell,” and other political art. And Revere didn’t bother with most of the hatching.

Tuesday, February 04, 2020

Robert Fulton’s Submarine Struggles

Here’s another submarine design from the eighteenth century, this one from the artist and inventor Robert Fulton.

Fulton was born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1765, and moved to Philadelphia at the end of the Revolutionary War, establishing himself in the new republic. A few years later he went to London, where he studied art under Benjamin West and became interested in the big engineering developments of the age, particularly canal building and steam engines.

In the 1790s Fulton also tackled the challenge of submarines. I started looking into his work in those waters because some sources said he was inspired by David Bushnell’s Turtle. But Bushnell’s plans weren’t published until 1799, when Thomas Jefferson passed them on to the American Philosophical Society. There doesn’t seem to be any private link between Bushnell and Fulton. The two men’s designs show some similar points but many differences, and, as I wrote yesterday, many Europeans had been working on submarines for a long time.

In the spring of 1797 Fulton sold a big chunk of the proceeds from his canal-building system to John Barker Church in exchange for a big chunk of cash. Now flush, the inventor decided to visit France. He embarked in June so suddenly that he didn’t obtain a passport, which looked a bit suspicious. After all, Britain and France were at war. Even being an American was no guarantee of being welcomed since the U.S. of A. had just ratified the Jay Treaty.

Fulton planned to stay in France for six months. Instead, in December 1797 he laid out his system of submarine warfare to the French government and asked for funding to develop it. Even though he didn’t get that grant, Fulton saw enough opportunity in France that he stayed for more than six years.

In 1800 Fulton moved to Brest to build and test a submarine large enough for a crew of three. As shown above, the Nautilus had spinning propellers, a breathing tube, and a fold-out sail for propulsion when it surfaced. It worked fine in tests. Fulton also developed torpedos for that ship to use against enemy vessels.

The target of those torpedoes was the Britain’s Royal Navy. The Quasi-War between France and America also heated up in the late 1790s. Fulton had friends and interests in both Britain and the U.S. of A., but he didn’t seem worried about his inventions being used to attack those countries. Instead, he enjoyed being able to bring his ideas to reality and being lauded as one of the country’s relatively few engineers.

Like many Americans, Fulton admired republican France and hoped it would succeed. When he was actually in the country, however, Napoleon Bonaparte was taking over, turning France into a dictatorship on its way to an empire. And then, just as Fulton completed his experiments and submitted his report to the government, France made peace with its enemies and cut defense spending. Napoleon also became suspicious of Fulton when he dismantled the Nautilus for rebuilding, so no further funds were coming his way. In 1804 Fulton gave up on France and returned to Britain.

The British government looked at Fulton’s submarine designs and gave him some money. He refined his ideas, producing the image shown below, but Britain never moved to the construction stage. Apparently the government was more interested in making sure Fulton didn’t go work for any other government than in actually realizing his designs. After a couple of years the inventor, now in his forties, got impatient and headed home to America.

In the U.S. of A. Fulton went back to steam engines. His partner in that enterprise was Robert R. Livingston, formerly of the Continental Congress. The two men had met in Paris, Fulton as an aspiring submarine builder and Livingston as his country’s minister to France. In New York, Fulton even married into the Livingston family. The result of that alliance was the first practical, long-lasting steamboat, which stayed on the surface but transformed travel all over the world.

Sunday, April 02, 2017

The Tragedy of André

Speaking of William Dunlap’s tragedy André, my friend John W. Kennedy has created an online text of that play by transcribing the 1798 edition and annotating it. You can find it all here.

Kennedy writes:

William Dunlap (1766–1839) dominated American theatre in his day as no one else ever did but David Belasco. He was born in Perth Amboy, and the family later moved to New York City. There is a pretty, but questionable, legend to the effect that he may have seen some of the theatrical productions in occupied New York in which John André had a hand.

He traveled to England in 1784 to study with Benjamin West, as was practically de rigueur for aspiring young American painters, but seems to have chiefly fallen in love with the theatre there. Upon his return to America in 1787, his first thought was to write an imitation of Royall Tyler’s hit, The Contrast, and Dunlap’s The Modest Soldier or Love in New York was accepted, though never produced.

But he continued to write, and was soon successful enough to be asked in 1796 to become managing partner in the Old American Company, so called because it was the return of the American Company, founded in 1752, which had retreated to the West Indies in 1778 after Congress had outlawed theatrical performances as incompatible with the war effort. André is one of the plays of this portion of his career.

The result was a tragedy with a “curiously Greek construction—it is written in scenes for two or three, places all the physical activity offstage, takes place in only a few hours’ time, and really wants only a chorus to be perfectly Athenian.”

Dunlap’s blank-verse text is accompanied by several supplemental texts:

three letters André wrote to Anna Seward in 1769, when he was eighteen.
André’s satirical poem “The Cow Chace.”
documents about André’s trial and execution.
Seward’s “Monody on Major André,” published in 1781.

Here’s a sample from the play, as the character identified only as “the General” laments in Act 5 that he must let Maj. André’s execution proceed:

O what keen struggles must I undergo!
Unbless’d estate! to have the power to pardon;
The court’s stern sentence to remit;—give life;—
Feel the strong wish to use such blessed power;
Yet know that circumstances strong as fate
Forbid to obey the impulse. O, I feel
That man should never shed the blood of man.

And here’s a discussion by Elfin Vogel and Michael Bettencourt of the challenges of staging André.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Panel on Washington in Roxbury, 24 Oct.

On 3 May 1797, Rufus King, then in London as the U.S. minister to Great Britain, wrote this in his diary:

Mr. [Benjamin] West called on me—we entered into politics after speaking of the Dinner at the Royal Academy and of the annual exhibition; Mr. West said things respecting Amer. had changed very much; that people who cd. not formerly find words of unkindness enough now talked in a different language; that the King had lately spoken in the most explicit manner of the wisdom of the American Gov. and of the abilities and great worth of the characters she produced and employed. He said the King had lately used very handsome expressions respecting Mr. [John] Jay and ——— and that he also spoke in a very pleasing manner of Mr. [Christopher] Gore.

But that in regard to Genl Washington, he told him since his resignation that in his opinion “that act closing and finishing what had gone before and viewed in connection with it, placed him in a light the most distinguished of any man living, and that he thought him the greatest character of the age.”

Two years later, on 28 Dec 1799, the British painter Joseph Farington called on West, and the older man began telling stories about British-American relations. According to Farington’s diary, West described this conversation with George III at some unspecified time toward the end of the war:

The King began to talk abt. America. He asked West what would Washington do were America to be declared independant. West said He believed He would retire to a private situation.—The King said if He did He would be the greatest man in the world.

West might have amalgamated his conversations with the king, but it’s clear that by the late 1790s George III firmly admired Washington for how he stepped away from positions of authority.

On the afternoon of Saturday, 24 October, the Shirley-Eustis House in Roxbury will host a panel discussion about Washington’s recurrent decision to give up power: “George Washington: The Ruler Who Would Not Be King.” The panelists include:

Dr. Robert Allison, chair of the History Department at Suffolk University and author of numerous histories of the Revolution.
Dory Codington, author of the Edge of Empire series of novels.
Stephanie Davis, journalist and founder of Embedded Systems of Boston.

The event begins at 3:00 P.M. Refreshments will be served in the second hour. Admission is $10 in advance, $15 at the door. Register through Eventbrite.

Saturday, March 28, 2015

Filling in the Hole in West’s Painting

Yesterday I showed an image of Benjamin West’s painting of the American diplomats who went to Paris to negotiate the end of the War for Independence.

As shown above, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay signed the treaty of peace with Great Britain. West also pictured Henry Laurens and William Temple Franklin, two other Americans involved in the negotiation. But he couldn’t get David Hartley to represent the British side he had signed for, so West abandoned the painting.

In the last few decades, at least two New England artists stepped in to fill that hole.

In 1983 the U.S. Postal Service commissioned a painting for a stamp commemorating then bicentennial of the treaty signing. David Blossom of Weston, Connecticut, created the image above, showing the treaty signers only—and Hartley from the rear. Esther Porter adapted the image for the stamp. Blossom’s original painting now belongs to Winterthur.

In the last decade, David R. Wagner of Scotland, Connecticut, undertook a series of paintings about events along the Rochambeau Revolutionary Route. To that he added an image of the Treaty of Paris, based on West’s original, but with Hartley inserted, reportedly based on other portraits.

Wagner’s painting was shown at the Carroll Museum in Baltimore and at Yorktown in 2008. Judging by the artist’s website, it is now available for purchase.

Friday, March 27, 2015

Hartley and Franklin, Reunited in Paris

I’ve been writing about the on-again, off-again correspondence of Benjamin Franklin and David Hartley, British scientist and Member of Parliament. Their relationship actually turned out to be a factor in the end of the war.

After London received news of the Battle of Yorktown, Lord North’s government fell. In March 1782 power shifted to the Marquess of Rockingham, longtime leader of the opposition, with a mandate to bring the American War to a close before it cost even more money. Rockingham filled the post of prime minister for all of four months before he died of the flu.

The Earl of Shelburne, one of Rockingham’s secretaries of state, took over. He was already steering negotiations with the U.S. of A.’s European diplomats through his envoy, the merchant Robert Oswald. By November 1782 Oswald worked out preliminary articles of peace with Franklin in France.

Meanwhile, Rockingham’s other secretary of state, Charles James Fox, refused to serve under Shelburne. He led other Rockingham Whigs, such as Edmund Burke, out of government. (That created openings for such rising politicians as William Pitt, who became Chancellor of the Exchequer at the age of twenty-three; they didn’t call him “the Younger” for nothing.)

David Hartley had opposed the American War all along, but he also disliked Shelburne and voted against the preliminary articles for peace. Hartley was a Fox ally, and he also maintained a personal friendship with Lord North, despite their political differences.

In April 1783 Fox and North, longtime opponents, made a surprising alliance to force Shelburne out of power. Shortly afterwards, George III appointed Hartley the new negotiator with the Americans. Fox and North both trusted Hartley, and they thought his friendly correspondence with Franklin would help to finish the negotiations on favorable terms.

Hartley walked into a very complex situation since France, Spain, and the U.S., though formally allied and bound to negotiate together, were all secretly angling for their own advantages and undercutting each other. Though there weren’t any more major campaigns on the North American continent, naval battles in the Caribbean and the siege of Gibraltar were still going on, tipping the balance of power and affecting different nations’ hunger for peace.

The Americans in Paris insisted on making very few changes to the terms they had reached with Oswald. If Hartley wasn’t going to sign over Canada, they weren’t about to concede anything else. France and Spain, meanwhile, thought the Shelburne ministry’s agreement to give the new American republic land all the way west to the Mississippi River was quite generous already.

In the end, the Treaty of Paris was basically what Oswald had negotiated eight months earlier. Hartley had voted against those terms, but his main contribution to the final treaty was the “Paris” part—he refused to leave the city for Versailles. On 3 Sept 1783, Hartley signed the final Treaty of Paris on behalf of Great Britain. Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay signed on behalf of the U.S.

(The picture above is Benjamin West’s famous unfinished canvas of the American diplomats involved in the negotiations in Paris. Hartley declined to pose.)

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

New England Historical Association conference, 13 Oct.

The New England Historical Association’s fall conference will take place this Saturday, 13 October, at Merrimack College in North Andover.

I won’t be able to attend this year, but some of the papers on the program caught my eye:

Thomas Goldscheider, “Shays’s Rebellion”
Jonathan Bratten, “War for the Soul of America: British Protestant Ministers in the French and Indian War, 1754-1763″
Bryan Sinche, University of Hartford, “Constituting Value in A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Venture, a Native of Africa”
Betsy DeBrakeleer, Willowbrook Museum, “‘Oh, look at the lady blacksmith!’: Recovering, Documenting, and Narrating the Historical Narrative of American Women Blacksmiths”
Robert G. Brooking, Georgia State University, “‘Plunged into a state of distress and ruin’: The Exile of Sir James Wright, Georgia’s Final Colonial Governor”
Debra A. Lavelle, Ohio State University, “Imperial Americans: The Presence of the Antique in Benjamin West’s Portrait of Colonel Guy Johnson and Karonghyontye” (shown above)
Daniel Gardner, Stonehill College, “The Magnetic Properties of Wampum: Shell Beads in North American Interregional Trade Systems”
Ann M. Becker, State University of New York, Empire State College, “The Revolutionary War Pension Act of 1818”

Friday, May 06, 2011

Playing Dress-Up with Mr. Copley

My posting earlier this week about John Singleton Copley’s portrait of Margaret Gage kicked up some interesting comments and emails, so I’m going back to the topic.

One of the advantages of having your portrait painted by Copley is that he could make you look better than you actually did. Not necessarily in physiognomy—the fashion among Americans at the time was to have their faces rendered accurately rather than idealized. But people asked for improvements in their body shape and their dress.

Comparing Copley’s paintings to English engravings has shown that he copied costumes, poses, and sometimes entire scenes from those sources. For example, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Lady Caroline Russell became, through a mezzotint by James McArdell (below), the model for Copley’s portrait of Mary Bowers (above), down to the position of her hands, the trees in the background, and the little dog in her lap.

Copley used John Faber’s engraving of Thomas Hudson’s painting of Mary Finch, Viscountess Andover, as the basis for portraits of Mary Hubbard, Katherine Amory, and other women.

Ladies might have themselves painted in clothing they never wore, particularly in public. While aristocratic Englishwomen often commissioned portraits in the unusual outfits they might wear to masquerades, North American women had no such opportunities—but had themselves painted in those unreal fashions anyway.

Thus, Copley’s 1756 painting of Ann Tyng shows her as a shepherdess, an approach he probably learned from watching Joseph Blackburn a couple of years before.

He portrayed Hannah Quincy in an antique “Vandyke” outfit, inspired by the clothing in Van Dyck paintings (or paintings that people in England then attributed to Van Dyck).

Copley might have supplied garments for his sitters, possibly pinning or draping them over the women’s usual clothing. We know from a 1768 letter to Benjamin West that he at least considered the possibility of buying “a variety of Dresses” at “a great expence.”

And if all else failed, Copley could just make a dress look better than anything in real life. His portrait of Elizabeth Watson shows a gorgeous pink gown with no seams breaking the expanse of satin.

As a result, we know we mustn’t take all of Copley’s portraits of women as showing them in ordinary dress of the period, or even the ordinary formal dress. Those sitters may never have actually worn those garments. The garments may never have actually existed.

TOMORROW: But what does that mean for the painting of Margaret Gage?

Friday, October 22, 2010

CHAViC Conference on Historical Prints, 12-13 Nov 2010

On 12-13 November, the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester is hosting a conference on “Historical Prints—Fact and Fiction”.

Among the presentations with Revolutionary-era content are:

Nancy Siegel, Associate Professor of Art History, Towson University, “Savage Conflict: The ‘Indian Princess’ as Aggressor and Aggrieved in 18th-Century Prints”
Carl Robert Keyes, Assistant Professor of History, Assumption College, “Marketing the New Nation: Patriotic Imperatives in Advertisements for Early American Prints” [a.k.a., using the Revolution to sell stuff!]
Laura Wasowicz, Curator of Children’s Books, American Antiquarian Society, “Where Bravery, History, and Fantasy Meet: Heroic Prints in Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Books”
Allison Stagg, Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art, University of London, “‘The first will grumble and the last will laugh:’ An American Audience for British Visual Humor, 1790-1810”
Aimee E. Newell, Director of Collections, National Heritage Museum, “Educational Exercise, Decoration or Symbol of Brotherhood? The Use of Historical Prints in Early American Masonic Lodges”
Anne Roth-Reinhardt, Ph.D. Candidate, English, University of Minnesota, “Pirate of Patriot? Representations of John Paul Jones in Melville’s Israel Potter”
Christopher N. Phillips, Assistant Professor, English, Lafayette College, “How Benjamin West’s Prints Made Art Epic”
Daniel C. Lewis, Dean of Communications and Humanities, Northern Virginia Community College, “Printmaker Goupil, Leutze’s Washington the Delaware [sic], and the Prints that Made it a National Icon in Nineteenth-Century America”

More details about each paper on the conference website. Registration costs $65, and folks registering after 29 October or walking in must pay $10 extra.

Who can identify the Revolutionary War event shown in the image above? Answer in the comments.

Boston 1775

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