A Job Recommendation from Dr. Warren

Last month the Times Observer newspaper of Warren, Pennsylvania, reported on an exhibit at the local historical society that included a letter from Dr. Joseph Warren, the city’s namesake.

According to the society’s managing director, a man named John Blair donated the letter in 1976, not saying how he had obtained it. “It’s been housed in a safe at the Historical Society that hasn’t been inventoried so the letter had been forgotten to some degree.”

A transcription of this letter was included in Richard Frothingham’s 1865 biography of Warren, so the text has been available to scholars. That book says it was addressed to the Massachusetts committee of safety, which met in Cambridge while the Provincial Congress was in Watertown.  

The society’s transcription of the letter is:

Watertown May 12, 1775.

Gentlemen

Mr. Pigeon is now sick, his business must be attended to, he requests that Mr. Charles Miller the Bearer hereof may be appointed his assistant and immediately directed to go upon Business – pray desire the young Gentleman you were pleased to appoint to be my clerk, to attend here as I have much writing to do and want a number of papers copied for the use of Congress.

I am Gentn. you most obed svt
Jos. Warren

“Mr. Pigeon” was John Pigeon of Newton, the congress’s commissary. Within a few weeks he was replaced, unable to keep up with the demands of the job. Once the Continental Congress assumed responsibility for the army around Boston, it appointed Joseph Trumbull the commissary general.

Charles Miller (1742–1817) was deputy commissary general under both Pigeon and Trumbull, working out of Cambridge. At the end of the siege he returned to Boston, where he had been a merchant, and continued to gather food and supplies for the army. He later became senior warden at King’s Chapel before retiring to his native Braintree/Quincy.

In 1779 Miller’s wife Elizabeth was hosting Dr. Warren’s eldest daughter, Betsey. According to Samuel Forman’s biography of the doctor, citing letters of Mercy Scollay, the Millers also took in the mysterious Sally Edwards.

TOMORROW: The next generation.

A Portrait by Pelham

We know that Henry Pelham followed his older half-brother John Singleton Copley into an artistic career.

However, aside from Pelham’s engraving of the Boston Massacre and his magnificent engraved map of Boston under siege, it’s hard to find artwork that he created.

Most of the portraits identified with Pelham are miniatures, and a lot of them are derived from his brother’s larger paintings.

For example, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts owns one small portrait attributed to Pelham showing the lawyer Peter Chardon (1737-1766). Experts believe Pelham created it based on Copley’s portrait of the man.

Likewise, Pelham probably miniaturized Copley’s portrait of the Connecticut merchant Adam Babcock, and the result is also now at the M.F.A. (picture shown here).

In New York, the Metropolitan Museum has a miniature of the Newburyport merchant Stephen Hooper that matches a line in Pelham’s correspondence. Another carries the signature “H P 1779,” which isn’t a positive identification but narrows the field.

The Dr. Joseph Warren Foundation just shared a quotation showing that the full-sized portrait of Elizabeth (Hooton) Warren shown above was made by Pelham. The M.F.A. has attributed this painting to the “Circle of John Singleton Copley,” which could mean almost any portrait artist from the period except Copley himself. Pelham and Copley really were a small artistic circle in Boston, however.

Descendants of Elizabeth Warren and her husband, Dr. Joseph Warren, owned portraits of them both. In seeking to sell the paintings in the 1850s, they described the doctor’s picture (the famous one now at the M.F.A.) as by Copley and “that of Madame Warren by Pelham.” Since at that time hardly anyone knew who Pelham was, there would be no reason to make a false attribution.

Portrait artists often priced their work in pairs, especially for married couples. Copley created handsome matched portraits of Elizabeth and Ezekiel Goldthwait, for instance. The Warren pairing suggests Copley and Pelham teamed up to create such a pair, perhaps at a discount from a complete set of Copleys.