The Last Years of Henry Howell Williams

I’ve written before about how Henry Howell Williams came from a wealthy, well-connected Roxbury family.

Close relatives married members of the Crafts, Dawes, Heath, and May families, all prominent in republican Boston.

Though in 1787 he told Henry Knox that he’d been “reduced to beggary” by his losses in the spring of 1775, Williams actually appears to have maintained a genteel lifestyle.

By 1784, as I wrote back here, Williams was once again living on Noddle’s Island, employing enough laborers that they needed their own building. An 1801 survey of the island labeled his rebuilt home as a “Mansion House.”

Williams also had the resources to keep petitioning one level of government after another, cajoling supportive letters from various officials. In 1789, the state of Massachusetts granted him £2,000.

Four years later, Williams bought the Winnisimmet ferry from the family that had run that concession for decades. He upgraded it and made good money for a decade crossing the Mystic River.

In 1797, Williams’s eldest daughter Elizabeth (1765–1843, shown here in a portrait by Gilbert Stuart) married Andrew Sigourney, who became the treasurer of Boston. His daughter Harriet married a son of John Avery, the state secretary. Other Williams siblings married another Sigourney, another Avery, and a couple of Williams cousins.

In that decade, Henry Howell Williams moved his family off of Noddle’s Island to mainland Chelsea. One of his last public acts, in January 1802, was to petition the state legislature to compensate him for the income he’d lose after a consortium built a bridge across the Mystic.

Williams didn’t live to see that bridge. He died in December 1802 after “three months confinement.” Lengthy death notices appeared in the Columbian Centinel and Massachusetts Mercury, obviously written by relatives and friends. They praised him as a generous host, a vigorous farmer, and a beloved family patriarch. (Notably, they make no mention of any service to the republic during the war.)

As I mentioned above, Williams’s daughter Harriet married John Avery’s son, John, Jr. In 1800, the next year, they had a son, also named John. And then in October those parents were lost at sea. Little John was raised by relatives, perhaps maiden aunts. He wouldn’t have remembered his grandfather, but he would have grown up on stories about him.

In particular, young John probably heard about the building on the Noddle’s Island farm that had once been a barrack for the Continental Army in Cambridge, and about how his grandfather’s livestock had gone to feed those troops. Putting those facts together in the most complimentary way probably gave rise to what Avery told William H. Sumner later in life: that his grandfather had been some sort of quartermaster supplying the army, and that the barrack had been a reward from the Continental commander, George Washington himself. Contemporaneous records tell a different story.

The third John Avery showed Sumner the file of documents his grandfather had collected to make his case for compensation. In 1911 another heir, Henry Howell Williams Sigourney, donated those papers to the Massachusetts Historical Society. They’re what got me started on this series about one long-extended outcome of the Battle of Chelsea Creek.

More Findings about a Famous Portrait

Back in spring 2019 I reported on the new scholarly conclusion that the painting shown here, for decades said to be Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington’s chef Hercules:

• was not by Stuart,
• did not show Hercules Posey or any other eighteenth-century cook, and
• probably, given the hat, showed a man from Dominica.

I wrote then:

One detail which should have made people wonder, I think, is that this painting is at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. An odd place to find an American painting linked to an American President, wouldn’t you say?

Later that year Mount Vernon published a more detailed story on those findings by curator Jessie MacLeod, and here’s a webpage adapted from that article. It answers my question of how this painting came to a Spanish museum:

What we know of the portrait’s story begins in the early 19th century, when it was owned by English painter Sir Thomas Lawrence. Sometime before his death in 1830, Lawrence gave the painting to his childhood friend John Hulbert as a wedding gift. This history is recorded in an early 20th-century file in the Witt Library at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. Here, an image of the portrait is filed under “Gilbert Stuart—Unidentified Sitters.”

In 1946, the portrait was purchased by Daisy Fellowes, an American socialite living in Paris. She displayed it in the dining room of her luxurious hôtel particulier, which was featured in a 1977 magazine. A caption identified the work as “Painting by Gilbert Stuart (an alleged portrait of the cook of George Washington).” The painting was purchased at auction in 1983 by Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza, who opened his namesake museum in 1992 (the Spanish government purchased the collection in 1993).

As for who really posed for the painting and who created it, the article states:

According to the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza,…“If the Thyssen sitter is Dominican, he probably fled to England as part of the exodus of English planters just before the French claimed the island from the English in 1778.” . . .

Considering the man’s neckpiece and the cut of his coat, as well as the painting style, researchers can date the portrait to about 1780. . . .

The latest research released by the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza asserts that, with the face and hat rendered in relatively broad brushstrokes, the portrait follows the general painting style of Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792), the first president of the Royal Academy in London.

I don’t know the art-history world well enough to know if “general painting style” means the museum is really pointing at Reynolds, at his studio or circle, or simply at artists working when his style was fashionable. But the details are fitting together better.

From William Fitzmaurice to the Marquess of Lansdowne

William Fitzmaurice was born in Dublin in 1737 and grew up in rural southern Ireland. His parents were from aristocratic families, though neither had titles. William’s father John was a grandson of the Earl of Kerry through a younger son, and his mother Anne was daughter of a knight and brother of the first Earl of Shelburne.

Both those titles—Earl of Kerry and Earl of Shelburne—were in the Irish peerage. The men holding them were entitled to seats in the Irish House of Lords but not the British House of Lords, which covered England, Wales, and Scotland. Even though people in Great Britain addressed Irish peers by their noble titles, they were technically not British lords. I get the sense that British lords could look down on them a bit, but British commoners were supposed to look up.

In 1743, the year William turned six, his father John Fitzmaurice won a seat in the Irish House of Commons, which he held for the next eight years. At that point, in 1751, the status of the family began to change.

First, William’s uncle the Earl of Shelburne died, leaving his extensive property to John Fitzmaurice on the condition that he adopt his wife’s family name, Petty. John Fitzmaurice accepted the name John Petty Fitzmaurice, in later generations hyphenated as Petty-Fitzmaurice to make the alphabetization easier to remember.

Thus, in 1751 William Fitzmaurice, now in his teens, became William Petty Fitzmaurice.

Later in 1751, the Crown granted John Petty Fitzmaurice two noble titles: Viscount Fitzmaurice and Baron Dunkerton. It was very common for a peer to have subsidiary titles under his main one, moving down the ladder of peerages (duke, marquess, earl, viscount, and baron). Those titles for John Petty Fitzmaurice came in the Irish peerage, and the new viscount became a member of the Irish House of Lords.

Furthermore, in the British aristocratic system, the eldest son and heir of a peer is by courtesy addressed by his father’s second-highest noble title. Thus, in late 1751 William Petty Fitzmaurice became Lord Dunkerton.

In 1753 the Crown gave Viscount Fitzmaurice a promotion within the Irish peerage by recreating his late brother-in-law’s title of Earl of Shelburne for him. He was thenceforth addressed as Lord Shelburne.

That meant that in 1753 young Lord Dunkerton gained the courtesy title of Lord Fitzmaurice. That’s how he was addressed when he went off to Oxford University two years later.

As I said before, the Earl of Shelburne wasn’t entitled to a seat in Great Britain’s House of Lords because he was an Irish peer. Likewise, Lord Fitzmaurice, despite being able to use that courtesy title, wasn’t a British peer. As such, they could stand for seats in the British House of Commons. And that’s what Lord Shelburne did in 1754, winning a seat he held until 1760.

In that year, the Crown gave the Earl of Shelburne a title within the British peerage: Baron of (Chipping) Wycombe. That moved him out of the British House of Commons into the British House of Lords. People continued to call him Lord Shelburne because, even though the British peerage was more powerful than the Irish peerage, an earldom was more prestigious than a barony.

As for Lord Fitzmaurice, after his years at college he joined the British army and served under Gen. James Wolfe in the 20th Regiment of Foot. He saw action at Rochefort, Minden, and Kloster-Kampen. Good service and noble background allowed Fitzmaurice to become a military aide-de-camp to King George III in 1760, with the rank of colonel. Within the army he was thus Col. Fitzmaurice. (This rank was controversial since more senior officers were passed over, but it stuck. Furthermore, even though the man stopped being active in the army, he was by protocol promoted to major general in 1765, lieutenant general in 1772, and general in 1783.)

Also in 1760, Lord Fitzmaurice stood for his father’s seat in the British House of Commons and won. The next year he was elected to the Irish House of Commons representing County Kerry. But before he could take those seats, the situation changed again.

In 1761 the Earl of Shelburne died. Lord Fitzmaurice became the Earl of Shelburne within the Irish peerage and Baron Wycombe within the British peerage. He was no longer eligible to serve in either country’s House of Commons. (His successor in Britain was Col. Isaac Barré, a political protégé and fellow veteran of Gen. Wolfe’s regiment.)

It was as the Earl of Shelburne that the former Lord Fitzmaurice, former Lord Dunkerton, former William Petty Fitzmaurice, born William Fitzmaurice, became a player in British-American politics. Prime Minister George Grenville appointed him First Lord of Trade in 1763, but Shelburne decided to ally with William Pitt and resigned a few months later. When the Marquess of Rockingham and Pitt (now Earl of Chatham) formed a government in 1766, Shelburne became Southern Secretary, but was pushed out after two years.

After 1775, Shelburne sided with Chatham, Rockingham, Barré, and others in opposing Lord North’s war policies. (Lord North was in the House of Commons, not the House of Lords, because his courtesy title came from being son and heir of the Earl of Guilford.) When news of the defeat at Yorktown arrived, Lord North’s ministry fell and was replaced with a government led by the Marquess of Rockingham. Shelburne was named one of two Secretaries of State—the first Home Secretary, in fact.

Then Rockingham died after only a few months, and the Earl of Shelburne became Prime Minister in July 1782. He and his envoys handled most of the negotiations with France, Spain, and the U.S. of A. to create the Treaties of Paris. However, before those documents were signed, Shelburne’s coalition fell because of internal wrangling. Rockingham’s other Secretary of State, Charles James Fox, made an alliance of convenience with Lord North to oust Shelburne in April 1783.

The next year, young William Pitt the Younger took over the Prime Minister’s office. Rather than bring his father’s old ally Shelburne back into government, he arranged for the man to gain a British peerage higher than his Irish one: Marquess of Lansdowne. That was the former William Fitzmaurice’s main title from 1784 until his death in 1805.

The marquess stayed out of politics, but he did do something significant in American culture: he commissioned Gilbert Stuart to create a full-length portrait of George Washington. Stuart delivered that picture in 1796. The artist also produced copies of what became known as the “Lansdowne portrait,” including one hung in the White House since 1800. The marquess’s descendants sold the original to the U.S. National Portrait Gallery in 2001 for $20 million.

The seed for this posting was my realization that mentions of Lord Shelburne and Lord Lansdowne in the late 1700s referred to the same man. I started to wonder whether his name and status had changed at other times in his life. I had no idea how complicated the answer would be.

“Send my Children to me this Evening”

As I quoted yesterday, on 10 Nov 1780 Latin School rector Heinrich Verheyk sent American diplomat John Adams a letter stating that his eldest son, John Quincy Adams, was misbehaving in an attempt to get expelled.

John Adams responded immediately:

Sir

I have this moment received, with Surprise and Grief, your Billet.

I pray you Sir, to send my Children to me this Evening and your Account, together with their Chests and Effects tomorrow. I have the Honour to be, with great Respect, Sir, your humble servant,

He whisked both John Quincy and younger son Charles out of the Latin School at the Singel.

We don’t know what conversations took place in the Adams house that night. We do know that Adams already disagreed with how the school was placing John Quincy in a class with younger boys instead of letting him study Greek. So, while he may have been mortified at his son’s reported misbehavior, he sympathized with the motive behind it.

Adams cast about for a way for his boys to continue their education. John Quincy was thirteen, a year away from the age when many elite Massachusetts boys went to Harvard, and Charles was ten. They needed Latin and Greek for college. Adams was too busy trying to convince the Dutch republic to recognize the U.S. of A. to teach them himself. John Thaxter, who had tutored the boys in Braintree and aboard the ship to Europe, was still in Paris helping the American diplomats there.

Somehow Adams learned about another possible source of information: a young man from Newport, Rhode Island, named Benjamin Waterhouse (1754-1846, shown above as painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1775). He had started studying medicine as an apprentice at age sixteen and then sailed to Britain for more advanced training in March 1775, just before the Boston Port Bill took effect. Though Waterhouse spent the next three years in wartime Britain, he supported the independent U.S. of A.

In 1778 Waterhouse went to study at the University of Leyden, reportedly disconcerting the authorities by declaring himself a citizen of the free American states, which Holland had yet to recognize. After finishing a medical degree in 1780, he went back to Britain to visit his mentor there, then returned to Leyden to attend lectures on law and history. Perhaps on that trip he passed through Amsterdam, a little over twenty miles north of Leyden, and met the American minister.

Sometime in November or early December Adams asked Waterhouse if there were educational opportunities for his sons in Leyden. On 13 December the young doctor wrote back:

It so happened that I could not see the persons of whom I wished to enquire concerning the Schools, mode of education &c. untill yesterday, otherwise I should have written before.—

The Gentlemen from whom I have my information have each of them a young person under their care about the age of your eldest, and are well acquainted with every thing appertaining to education in this City, from conversing with them I am able to inform you that besides the publick-school which is a good one, there are private masters in the latin and greek, who at the same time they teach these languages, teach the greek and roman History. With boys who are far advanced in greek they read and explain Euripides, Sophocles and others.

The same person will if required repeat any of the Law-lectures to the pupil, and that indeed is what they are principally employed for, by those whose wives are to be Mevrouws [i.e., ladies].— There is a teacher of this kind in Leyden who is both an elegant schollar and a gentleman, such a one asks 20 ducats a year. . . .

In regard to living I am persuaded they can live here for much less than at Amsterdam. Three furnished rooms would probably cost 20 guilders a month. We find our own tea, sugar, wine, light and fire, and give one ducat a week for dinner, it is always the same price whether we go to the public-house, or have it brought from thence to our own rooms . . .

In respect to their being Americans or Sons of Mr. Adams they will never meet with any thing disagreeable on that head, where any profit is like to accrue little do the Dutchmen care for their political, or even religious principles—Turk, Jew, or Christian make no difference with them. I beleive we may say of them as they said of themselves at Japan when the Japonese enquired if they were christians—they answered, they were Dutchmen.

If the Gentlemen should come, I can insure them an agreeable Society and a genteel circle of acquaintance. If they should not, I hope at least they will come and pay us a visit, and I think I need not add how ready I should be to render them any service in my power.

Meanwhile, Adams had summoned Thaxter from Paris.

TOMORROW: A new arrangement.

A Portrait of Thomas Oliver?

Speaking of Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver, here’s a painting that in 1929 was sold to the Museum of Fine Arts for $2,500 as a portrait of Oliver by Joseph Blackburn.

The picture was signed “I Blackburn Pinxit 1760.” Oliver’s name was penciled on the stretcher.

According to the dealer, Frank W. Bayley, this portrait of Thomas Oliver and another of his wife Elizabeth went into the custody of Penelope Vassall, Elizabeth’s aunt by marriage, after the Revolution.

I imagine that could have happened in the fall of 1774, after the Olivers left Cambridge, or after the war, when Penelope Vassall returned to her home there. Bayley provided a line of inheritance for the portraits from Penelope Vassall ending with “Elizabeth Degan of Brooklyn.”

Bayley was the author of a big early study of John Singleton Copley and another book on five other portrait artists in colonial America. He was also an art dealer heading the Copley Gallery in Boston, which sold a lot of eighteenth-century portraits.

In 1931 Oliver Elton shared a paper about Thomas Oliver with the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. About this painting, Elton said:

It is an excellent half-length pastel by Joseph Blackburn. Thomas appears as a well-favored youth, clean-shaven, with brown hair worn long; with brown eyes, arched eyebrows, wide forehead, and well-cut lips. He wears a blue coat with glimpses of gold lining, and a white stock. He also wears an expression, rather engaging, of modest complacency and inexperience; but not, I think, of weakness.

Around the same time, Bayley authenticated a portrait of George Washington as painted by Gilbert Stuart, helping a New York gallery to sell it to a Boston collector for $25,000.

When the new owner became suspicious, he sent the canvas to the Museum of Fine Arts for another look. According to Robert C. Vose, Jr., writing in the Archives of American Art Journal in 1981, conservators “removed a lining canvas and found, on the back of the original, the signature of a female art student who had made it as a copy at the Museum three years before.”

Bayley killed himself in 1932.

The Colonial Society published the Oliver picture with Elton’s article the next year. However, other scholars began scrutinize all the portraits Bayley had sold in his final years. In April 1936, the American Antiquarian Society published an article by John Hill Morgan and Henry Wilder Foote (P.D.F. download) newly identifying many paintings by Joseph Blackburn and reappraising the identification of others.

In particular, they looked at the portrait said to show Thomas Oliver. They agreed that Blackburn was not known to have worked in pastels and the painting did not fit his style, no matter if his name was painted on it.

Morgan and Wilder also found that though there was a Degen (spelled slightly differently) branch from the Vassall family, neither genealogy nor local directories could locate Elizabeth Degan of Brooklyn or her supposed father, the people who had allegedly owned this canvas.

Likewise, that article cast doubt on the picture of Elizabeth Oliver and portraits said to show Gov. Frances Bernard, his wife, and Gov. Thomas Hutchinson—all signed “I Blackburn Pinxit 1760” and sold by Bayley.

In 1981 Vose wrote about his family’s gallery:

My father bought nine “Colonial” portraits from [Bayley]. Most were accompanied by certificates stating that they were likenesses of Governors or other important American personages. All have proven to be eighteenth-century English paintings whose documentation was expertly forged. Mr. Bayley bought them from a Mr. [Augustus] Deforest in New York and the certificates were contrived in New York by a Mrs. Winter.

And that is why the Museum of Fine Arts doesn’t display this painting, and why it’s no longer used as a portrait of Lt. Gov. Thomas Oliver.

William Eustis Returning to Roxbury

At the start of the Revolutionary War, William Eustis (1753-1825) was a medical student of Dr. Joseph Warren. A son of Dr. Benjamin Eustis, the young man was going into the family business.

Eustis’s training was cut short in 1775 for obvious reasons. He joined the New England army as a surgeon for the artillery regiment, treating the wounded after Bunker Hill and the battles of the New York and New Jersey campaign. In 1777 Eustis shifted to overseeing a military hospital north of New York City.

At the end of the war, William Eustis returned to Boston and began a private practice. He entered politics after the Shays Rebellion, serving several years in the Massachusetts House and Governor’s Council. In 1800 he ran for Congress as a Jeffersonian, beating the future mayor Josiah Quincy; in 1804 those two men competed again, and this time Quincy won. Around 1806, William Eustis sat for a portrait by Gilbert Stuart, shown above.

President James Madison appointed Eustis to be his first Secretary of War, hoping to win over New Englanders. With neither the military experience nor the bureaucratic finesse necessary for the job, the doctor lasted right up until there actually was a war in 1812. A couple of years later, Madison made Eustis the U.S. minister to the Netherlands. At least that wasn’t a disaster.

Back in the U.S. of A., Dr. Eustis bought the mansion originally built on a Roxbury hilltop for Gov. William Shirley. He and his wife Caroline, who was also his sister-in-law, lived there for more than forty-five years until her death.

Eustis once again ran for Congress in 1820. Meanwhile, he was also the Jeffersonians’ candidate for Massachusetts governor, losing to a fellow doctor and Revolutionary War veteran, John Brooks. In 1822 Brooks chose not to run again, and the Federalists nominated the archconservative Harrison Gray Otis. That let the Jeffersonians portray Eustis as the moderate, experienced elder statesman. He won the race, and the Federalist Party was wiped out of power in the legislature the following year. Gov. Eustis died in office in 1825.

The Shirley-Eustis House, as the Roxbury mansion is now called, became a pioneering preservation project and museum in the twentieth century. Meanwhile, Stuart’s portrait of Dr. Eustis went into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art—but that institution had so many Stuarts it was hardly ever on display. This year the Met decided to deaccession the painting. Members of the Shirley-Eustis House Association raised the money to bid for it at auction.

Dr. Eustis’s portrait will therefore be welcoming visitors to Dr. Eustis’s house starting in 2020.

New Findings about an Old Portrait

Earlier this month Craig LaBan reported for the Philadelphia newspapers on the portrait shown here.

In recent decades this been widely identified as showing Hercules, a cook enslaved by President George Washington. Hercules achieved high status in the Mount Vernon workforce, but then he secured his freedom by leaving in 1797.

The painting has been attributed to Gilbert Stuart, apparently because he’s the most famous painter known to have painted the Washingtons around that time.

One detail which should have made people wonder, I think, is that this painting is at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid. An odd place to find an American painting linked to an American President, wouldn’t you say? (To be sure, there are reproductions in many American museums now.)

LaBan reported some important conclusions about the painting and Hercules:

• Experts in Stuart’s art agree that this canvas doesn’t match his technique. The only link to that artist is wishfulness.
• The tall white cylindrical hat that we know as a toque didn’t become standard for chefs in France until the early 1800s, spreading from that country to others. Hercules surely didn’t wear one at Mount Vernon or the Presidential mansion.
• The headgear in the painting looks similar to the hat of a man in a painting of free black people on Dominica made by the Italian artist Agostino Brunias (d. 1796) around 1770. 

Thus, the painting is most likely a portrait of a man on Dominica or another Caribbean island. An unnamed man by an unnamed artist—at least for now.

TOMORROW: A real trace of Hercules the cook?

Smithsonian to Restore Landsdowne Portrait Starting in 2016

The “Landsdowne portrait” of George Washington, painted by Gilbert Stuart in 1796 and purchased by the Smithsonian in 2001, is scheduled to be cleaned and restored starting in 2016. The Associated Press reports:

Conservators wanted to clean and restore the painting for many years, but the museum was reluctant to take it off view. The painting is in good condition but does have problems, including paint losses in Washington’s black coat, said CindyLou Molnar, the museum’s head of conservation [shown above]. The biggest problem is the heavy yellow varnish that disguises details in the painting.

“It will take me quite a while to figure out what it will take to safely remove the yellow resinous varnish and not disturb the actual paint surface,” Molnar said.

In 2001, film X-rays of the painting revealed some changes Stuart made in the picture. In one case, he moved a quill ink pen on the table beside Washington. The images showed how Stuart was having trouble adjusting the figure and objects in his original portrait, Molnar said. New technology will provide a clearer image beneath the surface. It’s not clear, though, whether any new discoveries will be made.

There will also be a “refreshing” of the museum’s galleries of Presidential portraits to tell more about each man and his administration. The U.S. government has long owned a backup copy of this portrait, which could presumably be moved over from the White House to the Smithsonian during the study and conservation period.

A Miniature Henry Knox

In Dealings with the Dead (1856), Lucius Manlius Sargent told this anecdote about the Rev. Mather Byles, Sr., a Loyalist minister who stayed in Boston after the siege and became notorious for being unable to resist a pun:

He was intimate with General [Henry] Knox, who was a bookseller, before the war. When the American troops took possession of the town, after the evacuation, Knox, who had become quite corpulent, marched in, at the head of his artillery.

As he passed on, Byles, who thought himself privileged, on old scores, exclaimed, loud enough to be heard—“I never saw an ox fatter in my life.” But Knox was not in the vein. He felt offended by this freedom, especially from Byles, who was then well known to be a tory; and replied, in uncourtly terms, that he was a “—— fool.”

That anecdote has been republished in biographies of both Knox and Byles, and in other books as well. It’s too good to resist.

But I’ve long wondered whether Henry Knox was really that fat at the time. The picture above shows a miniature of Gen. Knox by Charles Willson Peale, dated 1778 and now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this image Knox, while not miniature, doesn’t appear any fatter than many other gentlemen of his time.

When Peale painted Knox again around 1784, the general’s face had grown noticeably more jowly.

That might have been a peak point for Knox’s weight because on 18 May 1788 Abigail Smith wrote to her mother, Abigail Adams: “The General is not half so fat as he was.” (In his 1873 biography of the general, Francis S. Drake combined this remark with what Smith wrote about Lucy Knox on 15 June 1788.) At that time Smith was returning to America after some years in Europe, so she was comparing Knox in 1788 with him a few years earlier.

Knox’s later portraits by Edward Savage around 1790 and and Gilbert Stuart are also on the heavy side. (Mid-nineteenth-century American artists shaved down Knox’s belly like magazine art directors using Photoshop.) There’s no question Knox was a big man, but in 1776, when he was still in his mid-twenties, was he truly as fat as an ox?

Paul Jennings: “required a ladder to get it down”

In sorting out the various stories of how George Washington’s portrait was removed from the White House before the arrival of British troops in 1814, lately scholars have been paying special attention to the 1865 memoir of Paul Jennings, enslaved in the White House at the time.

Jennings (shown here, courtesy of the Library of America blog) was born in 1799, so he was still in his mid-teens as the foreign enemy approached. Over fifty years later he stated:

It has often been stated in print, that when Mrs. Madison escaped from the White House she cut out from the frame the large portrait of Washington (now in one of the parlors there), and carried it off. This is totally false. She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment. John Susé (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President’s gardener, took it down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of.

“John Susé” was obviously Jean Pierre Sioussat, whom Dolley Madison called “French John.” “Magraw, the President’s gardener,” was called an “Irish gardener, Thomas M’Gaw,” in Charles J. Ingersoll’s 1849 history of the war.

Some later authors said that Jennings held the ladder for Sioussat as he lifted the portrait off the wall, but Jennings made no such statement. In fact, he claimed no personal role in saving the portrait. I suspect that those later authors read that slaves had been involved, knew that Jennings was a slave in the White House, and made the leap to rendering him one of those slaves. But there were several other slaves on the scene as well, and he took no credit for saving the picture.

Furthermore, while Jennings refuted authors who stated that Dolley Madison cut the painting from its frame, he didn’t contradict Madison herself because she made no such claim. In her letters she wrote that she “insisted” on and “ordered” and “directed” the work. First Ladies with servants don’t lift heavy objects or break wooden furniture themselves. After all, that’s what servants are for.

All the accounts—from Madison, Jacob Barker, Sioussat, and Jennings—are easy to reconcile when we consider the:

• confusion and distress of the evacuation of Washington.
• large number of servants and other helpers who were probably rushing around, trying to save valuables, necessities, and lives.
• decades between the event and when people set down their recollections.

Madison gave the orders. Sioussat probably took charge of carrying them out. Sioussat, McGraw, and some anonymous black servants, free or enslaved, did much of the actual heavy lifting. (Jennings was privy to that work but not greatly involved; as a young footman who belonged to the Madisons, he might have been busy with their personal effects.) Barker, Robert DePeyster, and their anonymous slaves drove the painting away to safety.

The steps of the process appear to have been:

• deciding that the portrait must be saved.
• getting it down off the wall.
• breaking it out of its big decorative frame (leaving the canvas uncut and still stretched on its inner frame).
• loading the canvas into a wagon to be moved.

In 1849 Sioussat told Ingersoll that Dolley Madison was gone before all these steps were complete, and Jennings hints the same. However, she must have stayed long enough to ask Barker and DePeyster to drive it away, and by that time it was down from the wall. Again, she made the arrangements, though the servants did the work.

Jean Pierre Sioussat: “laboring with a hatchet”

Busy in the background of the accounts of saving George Washington’s portrait from the advancing British army in 1814 are the servants—the people who probably did most of the heavy work. Dolley Madison wrote, “I directed my servants in what manner to remove it from the walls.” Jacob Barker recalled being “assisted by two colored boys” as he drove away with the canvas.

Some of those servants were still living in the capital when this episode launched a minor historical controversy in 1848. One was Jean Pierre Sioussat (1781-1864), White House doorman during the James Madison administration (shown here). Dolley Madison referred to him as “French John (a faithful domestic)” in the letter she dated 1814 and provided to a biographer more than twenty years later.

Charles J. Ingersoll relied on Sioussat’s memory in his Historical Sketch of the Second War between the United States of America and Great Britain (1849):

Mrs. Madison, with the carving-knife in her hand, stood by while French John and others strove to detach the picture uninjured from its heavy external gilt frame, and preserve it whole on the inner wooden work, by which it was kept distended and screwed to the wall.

Charles Carroll, of Bellevue, a gentleman intimate in the President’s family, entered from the affair of Bladensburg [i.e., the British rout of American forces], while the French porter, John Siousa, and Irish gardener, Thomas M’Gaw, were laboring with a hatchet to take down the picture, and remonstrated against Mrs. Madison risking capture for such an object, which, Mr. Carroll urged, ought not to delay her departure.

Her letter to her sister, Mrs. Washington, states that the picture was secured before she left the house. Mr. Siousa, who is highly worthy of credit, thinks she was gone before it was done, as her letter expresses the accomplishment. The Irish gardener, to whose aid, in the midst of the work, Mr. Jacob Barker came in, according to Siousa’s recollection, while he was gone to bring an axe, got the picture down from the wall, and placed it in the hands of Mr. Barker; with whom, according to Siousa’s statement, there was no other person except a black man, whom he took for Mr. Barker’s servant.

There might be other descriptions based on Sioussat’s stories, but I haven’t found any directly from him or claiming to be based entirely on his words.

TOMORROW: A fifteen-year-old witness, and trying to pull it all together.

Jacob Barker: “the portrait was taken by Mr. Depeyster and myself”

When Charles Carroll of Bellevue’s son claimed that his father had saved the Gilbert Stuart portrait of George Washington in the White House in 1814, Dolley Madison wasn’t the only person who responded.

In 1847 Jacob Barker (1779-1871), a businessman in New Orleans, wrote a letter confirming that he and Robert DePeyster had carried the painting away from the presidential mansion at the First Lady’s behest. Barker also wrote: “Several persons assisted in taking down the portrait, and the most active was the venerable Mr. Carroll.”

That wasn’t good enough for the younger Carroll, who wrote a newspaper article niggling at Barker’s mistaken details. Barker then replied with a much longer account of the event, dated 8 Feb 1848. This extract picks up as Barker rushes back to the White House after the American defenses have broken:

As soon as our troops broke and retreated, the President sent his servant express to warn his good lady of her danger, with directions to leave immediately. . . . The messenger preceded me five or ten minutes, having passed me on the Pennsylvania avenue, and given the information, with a request that I would repair to the house and assist in their departure. . . .

Whether I found your father there, or whether he came in subsequently, I do not know; but I do know that he assisted in taking down the portrait of Washington and left the house with the President, leaving the portrait on the floor of the room in which it had been suspended to take care of itself, where it remained until the remnant of our army, reduced to about 4,000, passed by, taking the direction of Georgetown, when the portrait was taken by Mr. Depeyster and myself, assisted by two colored boys, from the said room; and with it we fell into the trail of the army and continued with it some miles. Overtaken by night, and greatly fatigued, we sought shelter in a farm house.

No other persons assisted in removing or preserving the picture. I acted at the special request of Mrs. Madison, and Mr. Depeyster co-operated with me in carrying her wishes into effect. I always supposed the praiseworthy solicitude originated with her; it would require very positive and clear proof to induce me to change that opinion. It certainly did not originate with me or with Mr. Depeyster; nor have I ever intimated that any other than Mrs. Madison was entitled to the least credit therefor.

The younger Carroll responded with more angry accusations, so in Barker’s next public letter, later in 1848, he cited Dolley Madison’s authority to assert that Charles Carroll deserved no credit at all, not even for helping to get the painting down from the wall. So there.

COMING UP: The servants speak.

(The photograph about shows Charles Carroll’s 1801 Bellevue mansion in Washington, D.C., now known as Dumbarton House and the headquarters of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America.)

Dolley Madison: “I have ordered the frame to be broken”

Among the most famous legends of Dolley Madison is that she saved Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington from the White House as the British army approached the capital in 1814. Thomas Fleming’s Smithsonian article “How Dolley Madison Saved the Day” does a good job of retelling this story.

A major source for that episode is Madison’s own letter to her sister dated 23 Aug 1814, which says in part:

Our kind friend, Mr. [Charles] Carroll, has come to hasten my departure, and is in a very bad humor with me because I insist on waiting until the large picture of Gen. Washington is secured, and it requires to be unscrewed from the wall. This process was found too tedious for these perilous moments; I have ordered the frame to be broken, and the canvass taken out it is done, and the precious portrait placed in the hands of two gentlemen of New York, for safe keeping.

However, that letter exists only as a manuscript Madison created in the 1830s for a biographer. In a 1998 article “Dolley Madison Has the Last Word” (readable here), David Mattern notes that this text has a different tone from a letter she definitely wrote after fleeing Washington, more brave and less self-pitying. As a result, historians think that Madison might have composed that account from memory or reshaped an authentic contemporaneous letter to tell the story as she wished it made public.

In the mid-1840s Charles Carroll of Bellevue’s son began to assert publicly that his father had been responsible for saving the Washington painting. In 1848 Dolley Madison wrote that Carroll didn’t deserve such credit. She reiterated that saving the painting was her idea: “I directed my servants in what manner to remove it from the walls, remaining with them until it was done.” She also identified the two New York gentlemen who received the painting as Jacob Barker and Robert DePeyster—the latter being the father of the newspaper publisher to whom she wrote.

COMING UP: Other eyewitness statements.

Legends of the Lansdowne Portrait

Yesterday I mentioned Gilbert Stuart’s “Lansdowne portrait” of George Washington now hanging at the Smithsonian. While researching the posting, I stumbled across some small controversies involving that portrait.

Some articles on the web (including its Wikipedia entry until I edited it) say that portrait was the one saved from the White House as the British army approached. But that painting was commissioned for the first Marquess of Lansdowne (formerly Earl of Shelburne) and shipped to his home in England before he died in 1805. It didn’t come back to the U.S. of A. for many decades.

Rather, Stuart painted multiple copies of his Washington portraits, which are classified in three groups, called “Vaughn,” “Athenaeum,” and “Lansdowne” after the owners of their most prominent examples. The “Lansdowne” of 1796 was a full-figure painting, obviously the most expensive.

The U.S. government bought a copy of Stuart’s “Lansdowne” pose for $800 in 1800. That went into the President’s mansion and hangs in the twice-rebuilt White House today.

However, there have been whispers that Stuart himself didn’t paint that canvas, that it’s a copy by a younger artist named William Winstanley. Stuart told a story about Winstanley copying his work and inviting him to touch the copies so they could be sold as coming (at least in part) from the more famous artist’s hand.

But Stuart had a strong reason to claim that there were unauthorized copies of his work floating around. Just three years before the U.S. government bought the White House copy (from a dealer he secretly worked with), Stuart had taken $500 from the government for a copy that he appears to have never delivered, according to this article at Revolutionary War and Beyond. So had he sold the same painting twice?

The mystery of who painted the White House portrait bubbled up again in 1975 when former National Portrait Gallery director Marvin Sadik told ARTnews that Winstanley had created that painting. Sadik didn’t appear to have new evidence; rather, his argument was based on the aesthetic judgment that the face in the portrait was “dead.” (Ironically, decades earlier authors had claimed that Stuart had painted that face but Winstanley had painted the somewhat mismatched body—also apparently based on no evidence.)

As ARTnews reported in 2004, Sadik’s comments caused the government to clean and study the White House portrait anew. Its experts agreed that it was by Stuart, though not his best example of the pose. The head and body don’t make a good match on the other “Lansdowne” portraits, either. Nevertheless, Sadik remained unconvinced. And the painting remained in the White House.

TOMORROW: Four ways to save Washington’s portrait from the British army.

Buying George Washington’s Books

After George Washington died in 1799, his library of 900+ volumes was catalogued and divided among family members. Like about 300 more volumes he had owned at some time, many of those copies included the first President’s bookplate, signature, or notes. Washington’s heirs treated them like relics. Until then they needed money.

In the late 1840s, Vermont-born bookseller Henry Stevens bought most of the books still at Mount Vernon. Stevens had established his main office in London and become the British Museum’s agent for acquiring American material, so people suspected he was ready to ship the Washington books overseas. The Boston Athenaeum offers its take on what happened next:

In the spring of 1848, a group of patriotic Bostonians, horrified that the largest surviving portion of George Washington’s library from Mount Vernon might be sold to the British Museum, created a subscription fund, at $50 a share, to secure the collection for Boston. They succeeded. When the new Boston Athenæum building opened at 10½ Beacon Street just a few months later, the Washington Library became one of its principal and best-loved treasures.

According to LibraryThing, of 1,284 known volumes from Washington’s library, the Athenaeum owns 881.

A few years ago, something similar happened with Gilbert Stuart’s “Landsdowne portrait” of Washington, which had hung in the Smithsonian for decades. Rumors circulated that it, too, would be shipped overseas and end up in the hands of foreigners! (Never mind that portrait had been commissioned as a gift to the first Marquess of Landsdowne, the British prime minister who had signed off on American independence. His heirs had loaned it to the Smithsonian in the 1960s, but were thinking of selling it at auction.)

The retired newspaper executive Fred W. Smith, then president of his late boss’s Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, sprang into action. The foundation donated millions of dollars for the Smithsonian to buy the portrait and refurbish its gallery.

Over the next few years, Smith developed ties to Mount Vernon, and in 2010 the Reynolds Foundation gave that institution $38 million to build a research center. It will become the repository of documents from the Papers of George Washington, an ongoing publishing project at the Unversity of Virginia. The library website describes some other projects.

Among them, earlier this spring Mount Vernon announced plans to replicate Washington’s entire library. The Washington Post reported:

Mount Vernon has fewer than 50 of the original books and 450 duplicate additions [i.e., editions] — same book, same printing. The rest will hopefully come from the Boston Athenaeum, through purchases or donations, or they will be replicated with pages scanned from the Athenaeum’s collection and put into an 18th-century-style binding with endpaper and leather and gold tooling.

Like me, the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America read that story to indicate that Mount Vernon hopes to obtain the Athenaeum’s treasured Washington collection. That would be an interesting story to watch.

Reynolds Foundation money was also behind the Mount Vernon Ladies Association’s purchase this month of Washington’s copy of the 1789 Acts of Congress, shown above. That book includes the text of the new Constitution (with Washington’s notes on presidential duties) and Rep. James Madison’s proposed Bill of Rights. At $9,826,500, it’s the most expensive single item Mount Vernon has ever bought. According to Jeremy Dibbell at PhiloBiblos, that’s also the second-highest auction price ever for a printed book, and the highest for one without pretty color pictures.

One more mystery: Who was the underbidder for Washington’s Acts of Congress, the other party willing to pay over $9 million? Who else has the money?

Portrait of a Lady Chevalier

The British art dealer Philip Mould saw this portrait in a New York gallery, labeled as “Portrait of a Woman with a Feather in her hat” and attributed to Gilbert Stuart. Scholars last examined it around 1926, but it had not been seen publicly since that decade.

Mould saw something more in the painting, bought it, and brought it to Britain for conservation. Eventually he determined the portrait wasn’t by Stuart, and wasn’t of a woman.

According to the History Blog:

Old varnish and dirt had obscured the signature of the real artist: Thomas Stewart, an 18th century English painter who is not very well known today, but who starting in the 1780s was a successful painter specializing in portraits of actors. Next to the “T. Stewart” signature is the date “1792.” . . .

The cleaning also revealed another telling detail: a noticeable five o’clock shadow on the lady’s face. . . .

[Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d’Éon de Beaumont,] the Chevalier d’Eon…was known to always wear a black dress and the medal of the Order of St. Louis, which he had been awarded by Louis XV for his work as a spy. D’Eon was living in London in 1792, making a living doing demonstration fencing matches, so that fits with the timing and focus of Thomas Stewart’s work.

The Chevalier d’Eon was one of the most famous figures of late-eighteenth-century Europe—a French spy, soldier, and ambassador who fell out with the French monarchy. Having drafted the treaty that ended the Seven Years’ War, he settled in England in the mid-1760s. There D’Eon took to wearing women’s clothing all the time, telling various stories of why he did so. The chevalier’s life thus took him across several delicate boundary lines: male and female; France and Britain; war, espionage, and diplomacy.

As a foreigner of high birth, a recognized eccentric, and a public performer, the chevalier in exile became a British celebrity. Engravers created several images of him for public consumption, but this oil painting is a rare large formal portrait. Stewart evidently created it for Francis Rawdon-Hastings, second Earl of Moira, whom we have met during the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Click on the picture above for a webpage with a larger image of the portrait that includes the chevalier’s medal.

Washington Documents on Display for One Day Only

A loyal Boston 1775 reader alerted me to this event in Philadelphia.

The Historical Society of Pennsylvania will host a display of documents related to George Washington on one day only this week: Wednesday, 3 August, from 12:30 to 7:30 P.M. The display will include:

• one of Washington’s pocket diaries.
• Martha Washington’s cookbook and household journal while she was in Philadelphia.
• the diary of Washington’s private secretary, Tobias Lear (shown here, courtesy of USHistory.org), who chronicled the President’s last days and death (quoted back here)
• a lock of Washington’s hair
• portraits of Washington by Charles Willson Peale and Gilbert Stuart.

The H.S.P. event is free to all, and comes in conjunction with the exhibit “Discover the Real George Washington” at the National Constitution Center.

For those of us not able to visit Philadelphia on short notice, the society will make digital images of the documents and artifacts and create an online display by the end of the summer.

Mapping the Faces of Early America

Science magazine’s website reports on the new paper “What did the early American presidents really look like?: Gilbert Stuart portraits as a ‘Rosetta Stone’ to the pre-photography era,” by Krista A. Ehinger and Eric L. Altschuler, published in the journal Perception.

The hypothesis of this paper is that we can compare photographs of mid-nineteenth-century Americans to their portraits in youth by Gilbert Stuart, and thus mathematically figure out how Stuart’s images relate to their actual faces in later life. Then we can apply the same algorithm in reverse to Stuart’s portraits of people who didn’t survive to the age of photography, such as George Washington, and determine what they “really” looked like. (Or perhaps would have looked like thirty years later, if they’d survived.)

Some commenters aren’t so impressed by this approach. Margaret Livingstone of the Harvard Medical School says, “The differences [between Stuart’s rendering and reality] are minor compared to the effects of aging in photographs taken decades later.” In other words, the portraits are very good to start with.

Here’s a third data set to add to the mix: the busts of several of those same American statesmen in the late 1820s which John Henri Isaac Browere modeled from plaster casts of their actual faces. Those busts are at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, and they’re wonderful. That set includes John Quincy Adams, one of the subjects mentioned in the Perception article. So it’s possible to compare Stuart’s painting of J. Q. Adams to a very good three-dimensional rendering made only about a decade later.

It’s also possible to test the algorithm by comparing Stuart’s portraits of John Adams (there are more than one) and Thomas Jefferson to Browere’s busts of Adams at ninety and Jefferson at eighty-two (shown below).

Twitter Feed, 16-27 Feb 2010

• Edward Rothstein reviews new NYC African Burying Ground Museum for NY TIMES: nyti.ms/cZSQ0A #
• Went out tonight in storm for event. GAHHHHHH! But pretty good, long discussion of Phillis Wheatley at BPL. #
• Terrific illustrated intro to forensic anthropology of early British America—WRITTEN IN BONE, by Sally M. Walker bit.ly/cfZKow #
• RT @LooknBackward: Letter from a Revolutionary War spy, Written in invisible ink. bit.ly/cbm4a3 || Woburn's own Benjamin Thompson. #
• .@PaulRevereHouse: Feb 25 1775 found Paul Revere DETAINED on Castle Island. // Whoa! Probably a misinterpretation: bit.ly/9J8UKi #
• How did the American Revolution affect the Cape Cod fisheries? Talk on Wed, 3 Mar, in Concord, MA: bit.ly/94iBTp #
• RT @lucyinglis: Mystery Item #3 post.ly/Pj8u // Not for coffee, tea, or chocolate, sez our hostess. #
• RT @magpie: American Experience (PBS) this week is Dolley Madison - partly filmed at Montpelier, and looks to be entertaining. #
• RT @odellmuseum: Last night's blog post bit.ly/97ScTH - Bringing 1759 powder horn back to Nova Scotia. We are very excited. #
• RT @universalhub: 150th anniversary of the poem that made Paul Revere famous bit.ly/cATVW6 #
• RT @2palaver: Lecture series offers views on the American Revolution & Civil War in New Canaan, CT bit.ly/cJK7ik #
• RT @Gozaic: Check out Portsmouth's Black Heritage Trail. Walking and driving tour with 24 sites. ow.ly/1beVK #BlackHistoryMonth #
• RT @publichistorian RT @lindabnorris: New post: When should you close down your historic house? bit.ly/94TAsk #
• RT @rjseaver: thanks Tom Champoux for news and pix from NEHGS/Ancestry Family History Day in Boston - see tinyurl.com/NEHGSfhd #
• Two news items on George Washington and books from @JBD1: bit.ly/binZYS #
• RT @history_book: A Brief Narrative of the Case & Tryal of John Peter Zenger: with Related Documents - by Paul Finkelman j.mp/91L95u #
• @odellmuseum Indeed, Halfax had Stamp Act protests in 1765, so the 13 lower colonies were still hoping for support 10 years later. #
• @odellmuseum Looking at Washington's plan to raid Halifax garrison for gunpowder in Aug 1775 with 300 men. Plan faded after 6 weeks. #
• Profile of British light dragoon, 1736-1781, at British Soldiers, American Revolution: bit.ly/afAZMs #
• BOSTON GLOBE gives op-ed space to DC correspondent to highlight history behind his book FLIGHT FROM MONTICELLO: bit.ly/9aylp1 #
• WALL ST JOURNAL review of Michael Kranish's FLIGHT FROM MONTICELLO, on Jefferson's response to British march thru VA: bit.ly/9JVHh3 #
• RT @magpie: Blog commenter asks about the progress public historians have made showing "behind the scenes" to public bit.ly/czfHp0 #
• RT @TJMonticello: Jefferson in spaace! Early evidence of UFO? bit.ly/arNWiC NASA/Monticello/Han Solo connection nyti.ms/agbDCY #
• RT @history_book: Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York - by Thomas M. Truxes - Yale UP bit.ly/9RsTva #
• .@RagLinen A detail of Paul Revere's "View of the Year 1765" engraving using #comics technique: bit.ly/9ZQO62 #
• RT @RagLinen: New Rag Linen blog post: [advertisement for] Paul Revere's "View of the Year 1765" - tinyurl.com/yzl5nqn #
• RT @2palaver: John Brown House slave tunnels: Fact or fantasy? Providence, RI bit.ly/cgePPq #
• RT @ezraklein: This might be the single best thing I've read on Yoo, Bybee, & Bush admin's approach to torture. bit.ly/ccOQeU #
• Wednesday's Friends of the Minute Man Park lecture is on changes in fauna and flora in Concord since 1775: bit.ly/cKPHbM #
• Large majority of Americans believe George Washington told a lie or two as President: bit.ly/aETIR6 #
• Four great African-American migrations? BOSTON GLOBE review of Ira Berlin's MAKING OF AFRICAN AMERICA: bit.ly/9yS6m9 #
• RT @GeoWashington: Found in NY home: Gilbert Stuart portrait of me. Never liked it! Auction estimate is $300k. bit.ly/biOBbQ #
• RT @SecondVirginia: @GeoWashington was actually born 11 Feb 1732. Switch in 1752 from Julian to Gregorian calendar... bit.ly/b4UPOL #
• Considering Hester Bateman, London silversmith—did she make everything that bears her mark? Anything? bit.ly/cZ9dJp #
• Tomorrow in the snow—Richard Katula talks Edward Everett, George Washington & the lyceum movement: bit.ly/9rwSNx #
• Boston's Museum of Fine Arts rehangs monumental painting of George Washington at Delaware: bit.ly/cjDia4 #
• France buys the manuscript of Casanova's memoirs as national treasure: bit.ly/cEP7or Would USA ever buy Warren Beatty's memoirs? #
• Song from 1776: "And a Privateering we will go, my boys…" Song titled "Manly," which could launch 1000 SNL skits. bit.ly/bqU12z #
• WASH POST covers slaves and early Presidents at the White House: bit.ly/d4eZHl #
• RT @rjseaver: posted Bible pages from RevWar Pension File for Treasure Chest Thursday - see tinyurl.com/RSTT0218 #genealogy #
• Printed trade cards, invoices, other documentation // RT @lucyinglis: London Tradeswomen, Part 1 post.ly/OWV3 #
• RT @DedhamHistory: Story on Boston.com about the old Village Ave cemetery, one of the oldest in the country. bit.ly/cRA5A2 #
• RT @history_book: Inglorious Rebellion: The Jacobite Risings of 1708, 1716 & 1719 - Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson j.mp/cEpzzT #
• Food historian Sandy Oliver on how Washington dined, from the BOSTON GLOBE: bit.ly/drPR1a #
• RT @hallnjean: Black Revolutionary seamen 1775-1783 bit.ly/KzDfP from PBS 'Africans in America' resource bank // But image is forgery #
• RT @wceberly: Feb 17, 1782, French & British battle in Indian Ocean; begins 14-month-long series of 5 battles bit.ly/9PVdN4 #
• RT @lucyinglis: RT @artful_bodger: RT @elecmonk: 18th Century Theives' Cant bit.ly/d2kYxx #
• Ged Carbone's book on George Washington launches at Rhode Island Hist Socy tomorrow (Thurs) at 6:00: bit.ly/8Yfnle #
• Assessing the Revolutionary memoir of John Polhemus at Walking the Berkshires: bit.ly/dmV9yr #
• "Listen, my children,…" This year is 150th anniversary of Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride". Upcoming commemorations: bit.ly/aVhWLG #

The Nose Says No?

Before addressing the changing fortunes of Horatio Gates’s legal father, I thought I’d share visual evidence that might be pertinent to the general’s biological paternity.

You may have noticed that Gates had a long, curved nose. Indeed, it’s hard to miss that prominent facial feature in these portraits of him by Rembrandt Peale (left) and Gilbert Stuart (right).

Here are close-ups of portraits of the three paternity candidates I discussed yesterday: from left to right, Baron Horatio Walpole; his brother, prime minister Sir Robert Walpole; and Peregrine Osborne, the second Duke of Leeds.

The Walpole brothers look a lot alike, and the duke’s nose is the longest of the bunch. But I don’t think any of these gentlemen look strikingly like Gates. And to my knowledge, no one at the time claimed to see any physical resemblance, either.