Mary Livingston Maturin Mallett

For many years, the John Singleton Copley portrait I showed yesterday was tentatively identified as showing William Livingston (1723-1790), wartime governor of New Jersey and signer of the Constitution.

That was probably because in the late 1800s it was owned by a New Yorker named Livingston. Another possible connection lay in how that portrait’s frame matched one around Copley’s portrait of a woman named Mary Mallett, born Mary Livingston in New York.

However, the man in the portrait wears the coat of a British army aide-de-camp, and William Livingston never held any rank in the British army. Furthermore, other portraits of Gov. Livingston suggest he looked nothing like this man. So who was in the Copley portrait?

As Christopher Bryant described in his 2012 article, the key to this mystery was genealogy. The woman born Mary Livingston married Dr. Jonathan Mallett, an American surgeon attached to British army, in 1778. But before then, from 1765 to 1774, she had been married to Capt. Gabriel Maturin, military secretary (and thus an aide) to Gen. Thomas Gage.

At the end of the Revolutionary War, the Malletts evidently sailed for Britain with three canvases Copley had painted in 1771, portraits of the surgeon, his wife, and the late Capt. Maturin—i.e., her first husband. After being widowed a second time, Mary Mallett sent her own portrait to her sister in New Jersey and gave her husband’s portrait to one of his nephews, who gave it to a brother, who brought it to America. Then, apparently by coincidence, that Maturin sold the captain’s portrait to a man named Livingston.

Bryant made a convincing case that Copley had painted a matching pair of portraits for the Maturins, a pair that was (like the couple themselves) separated by circumstance. Is it possible to reunite them?

The Mary Mallett painting hasn’t been seen publicly since the early 1980s, when the Chrysler Museum deaccessioned it. (Its frame had already been removed to put around another portrait.) The Gabriel Maturin portrait is scheduled to be auctioned in New York by Bonhams on 21 May, with an estimated price above half a million dollars.

[Recreation of the Mallett painting in its original frame courtesy of Maturin.org.]

Capt. Gabriel Maturin’s “impenetrable Secrecy”

In late 2012, The Magazine Antiques [yes, I know] published an article by Christopher Bryant about a John Singleton Copley portrait he had recently identified.

In 1768, Gen. Thomas Gage came to Boston to oversee the arrival of troops patrolling the town, and while he was there Copley painted him. Evidently the general and his wife liked the result enough that they wanted the artist to visit New York in 1771 and paint her as well. So Gage’s officers went to work to make that happen, Bryant wrote:

While Captain John Small flattered and cajoled Copley to come to New York, Captain Stephen Kemble, Gage’s aide-de-camp and brother-in-law, went about the practical business of securing sufficient portrait commissions so that “Mr. Copely might be at a certainty” in making the trip. After friends and colleagues had been canvassed, Kemble sent Copley in April 1771 what survives as the only known contemporary list of Copley’s sitters, in this case fifteen indi­viduals who “subscribed” for a total of sixteen portraits of stated sizes.

Given its origins, the list naturally reflected the Anglo-American colonial administration centered in New York. Margaret Kemble Gage’s name appears first, while fourth down was the name “Captain Maturin.” Captain Gabriel Maturin, after having distinguished himself in action with his regiment at the Battle of Quebec, had been from 1760 General Gage’s military secretary and as such the general’s closest aide and effectively his chief of staff. As the grandson of a French Huguenot refugee to Ireland, Ga­briel Maturin had the requisite command of the French language required by Gage when he was appointed military governor of Montreal, but it was Maturin’s tact, charm, and discretion that made him an indispensible member of Gage’s command right up until Maturin’s death in Boston at the eve of the American Revolution.

Maturin had accompanied Gen. Gage to Massachusetts in 1774 (the same year that Copley left for Europe, never to return). The captain died on 15 December of a “throat distemper” or “Peripnenmony.” John Rowe described the funeral procession on the 17th:

first part of the 4th Regiment Under Arms
then the Band of Musick
then the Clergy—then the Corps
then the Generall & his Family
then the 4th Regiment without Arms
then the Officers of the Army & afterwards the Gentlemen of the Town.

The next month, Maturin’s New York obituary praised him as a military secretary: “eminent Abilities, unshaken Integrity, and impenetrable Secrecy.” Gage might have needed the last. That death notice also said, “a most amiable Wife is left to deplore her unspeakable Loss, in the Bereavement of the most affectionate, polite, tender and indulgent Husband.”

That wife was presumably back in New York, since Rowe hadn’t mentioned her, and presumably had the Copley portrait. But what happened to them then?

TOMORROW: Mr. Livingston, I presume?