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.

A Long Search for Hercules Posey

At Zagat, the chef and culinary historian Ramin Ganeshram shared the story of her research into Hercules Posey, head cook at Mount Vernon and the Presidential Mansion in Philadelphia until he freed himself from slavery.

In this article, Ganeshram describes the roots of her quest in childhood. Like me, during the Bicentennial she and her family toured the seat of the Continental Congress and other Revolutionary sites, but with a different perspective:

In 1976, I visited Philadelphia and Washington’s Mount Vernon to celebrate the American Bicentennial with my Trinidadian father. As young as I was, I could sense my father was moved as we stood on a long line to see the Liberty Bell. We didn’t know it, but as we waited, we stood on the buried remains of the President’s House where Hercules had lived.

No one talked about the enslaved Africans in the city of independence. It would be decades before the President’s House site was excavated as an open-air exhibit honoring them. It was a week later while visiting George Washington’s Virginia home that I began to viscerally sense this omission, although I was too young to name it. Instead, I sensed it in how my father’s mood changed, how he asked the tour guides about the enslaved people of the house and the field, and how his questions were deflected with twittering Southern charm. Later he brooded a long time at the slave quarters and the kitchen—Hercules’ kitchen. When I asked what was wrong, he just shook his head darkly. For years after, even the mention of Mount Vernon gave me a shifting sense of unease.

Later learning about Posey, Ganeshram started gathering more facts about him. This project took her through a picture book, cancelled at the last moment; a historical novel; experts’ realization that the painting said for decades to be Posey’s portrait was in fact nothing of the kind; and finally her discovery of records of the man in nineteenth-century New York. (In 2019 I recounted her findings and added a data point.)

Ganeshram ends her essay at another location linked to Posey:

When he died of tuberculosis on May 15, 1812, at age 65, Hercules was buried at the 2nd African Burial Ground in Chrystie Street. The cemetery was overflowing its boundaries by the time of Hercules’ death. He, along with others, was likely buried under what is now pavement and roadway. When the cemetery was disinterred in the 19th century and moved to Cypress Hills in Brooklyn, some were left behind. I believe Hercules was among them.

When I first visited the site in 2019, I looked around Chrystie Street with fresh eyes, seeking clues about Hercules. Seeing none, I spoke to him in my mind as I often do, for we have come a long way together. I brooded as I walked. If only I had a sign that I was on the right track. Stopping for a light at a cross-street, I looked at the curb ahead of me and saw a small white van with Hercules Dry Cleaning emblazoned on its side. I pressed on.

The former burial ground is now a private lot with an apartment building. At the southern end of Chrystie street hulks the Manhattan Bridge. Across the street is a public park where I have been encouraging New York City’s parks department to place a commemorative plaque for the Burial Ground, the once-thriving Free Black community, and for Hercules Posey—who was America’s first celebrity chef and so much more.

This post from the New York Cemetery Project has maps showing where the city’s Second African Burying Ground lay.

“Calling himself William Lee”

In October 1767, George Washington bought two “Mulatto” boys named Will and Frank and two “Negro” boys named Adam and Jack from Mary Lee, widow of Col. John Lee of Westmoreland County.

John Lee (1724-1767) had married the young widow Mary (Smith) Ball in 1749. They had no children together before he died. Given how the enslaved mulatto boys were Col. Lee’s property and later took his surname, he’s the man most likely to have been their father. In any event, his widow sent them off with another master soon after the colonel’s death.

Mary went on to wed John Smith in August 1768, and Washington dined with that couple the day after their marriage. There were so many Smiths, Lees, and Balls in Virginia that I can’t tell if John or Mary Lee was related to Washington’s mother’s Ball family or the Lee family his descendants married into, but they were in the same social circle.

Washington paid £61.15s for Will and Frank, more than three times the £19 he paid for the other two youths. All four slaves were probably teenaged males with many productive years before them, but the brothers’ lighter skin made them particularly valuable as domestic servants.

The Washington Papers include lists of “tithables” on his lands each June for many years. High among the “Ho[use]. Servants” on those lists from 1768 to 1771 was “Billy.” On 8 Oct 1770, Washington wrote in his diary about “my boy Billy who was taken sick.”

In September 1771, however, Washington recorded paying for a “pair of Boots for Will.” The editors of the papers wrote that there were enslaved men named Will on different farms, but those boots mostly likely went to the house servant he had bought in 1767, now close to manhood.

After that point, Washington stopped referring to the young man as “Billy,” at least in writing (except indirectly in connection with one incident I’ll discuss tomorrow). On the tithables lists “Will” appeared starting in 1772. His brother “Frank” had arrived on those list of house servants in 1771, along with “Herculas,” most likely Hercules Posey.

When Washington rode off to war in 1775, he brought Will with him as a body servant. The young man, then probably in his twenties, was at the commander’s headquarters in Cambridge, where on 22 Feb 1776 the steward recorded this expense in his: “Paid Margaret Thomas for making three shirts for William.”

Ten years later, on 18 Feb 1786, Washington made a comprehensive list of his human property. At the top was “Will Val de Chambre,” followed by waiter “Frank” and soon after cook “Herculus.” In that decade Will suffered two falls that injured his knees badly so he was no longer able to wait on Washington as had trained to do. He became a shoemaker at Mount Vernon.

In his 1799 will, Washington granted freedom and a pension to “my Mulatto man William (calling himself William Lee)”—the first time he referred to his wartime companion with a surname.

In a memoir first extracted in the American Turf Register and Sporting Magazine in 1829, Washington’s step-grandson, George Washington Parke Custis, referred to “his huntsman, Will Lee.” But he also wrote that that servant “was better known in Revolutionary lore as Billy.”

Indeed, while Washington himself never wrote of his body servant as “Billy” after 1771, other people referred to him by that diminutive. For example, on 27 Apr 1789 Clement Biddle wrote to the new President from Philadelphia, “I have frequently called to see Billy.” William Lee continued to live at Mount Vernon until his death around 1824, and nineteenth-century articles and memoirs about visiting there, such as the one by Elkanah Watson, called him “Billy.”

Nineteenth-century authors therefore developed a new way of referring to Washington’s body servant Will—as “Billy Lee,” a combination of names the general himself never used in writing. That’s become a standard reference. It shows up in, for instance, this month’s History Channel series about Washington, at least from some commentators.

But is that how historians should refer to the man, especially during the war years? We don’t know what Gen. Washington called him in conversation, but in writing it was always “William” or “Will.” We also know that William Lee kept the surname of his first owner (and father?) more than thirty years after coming to Mount Vernon.

“Billy” is of course a diminutive, and American slaveholders and racists used such nicknames to belittle black men. Yet we also use such names for friends; it’s possible that Washington’s valet was happy to answer to that name from people he knew well. It’s also conceivable that when Will Lee became disabled, still only in his late thirties and enslaved, he was reduced to such a state of dependency that people started to infantilize him as “Billy” again.

All those are conjectural possibilities, however. We know from Washington’s will that in middle age his former valet was “calling himself William Lee,” and that’s the name I use.

Hercules Posey, Cook in New York

Craig LaBan’s article for the Philadelphia newspapers about the mysteries surrounding George Washington’s escaped cook Hercules didn’t stop at debunking the claim that he was the black man wearing a tall white hat in a widely reprinted portrait.

LaBan also reported new information about what really happened to Hercules. The last known trace of him had been a 15 Dec 1801 letter from Martha Washington to the mayor of New York, thanking him for seeking Hercules and concluding, “I have been so fortunate as to engage a white cook who answers very well. I have thought about it therefore better to decline taking Hercules back.”

That hinted that the Washingtons, having previously sought Hercules in Philadelphia, came to suspect he was in New York.

Back in 2016, a children’s book about Hercules was abruptly canceled just before publication, as discussed back here. The author who had been recruited to write that book, Ramin Ganeshram, had already been working on a novel about the cook and the painter Gilbert Stuart, inspired by the mistaken belief that LaBan wrote about. That book, The General’s Cook, was published last year.

Ganeshram is also the executive director of the Westport Historical Society in Connecticut, and as doubts arose about the “Hercules portrait” that inspired her fiction she wanted to find out more about the real man. Ganeshram and her colleague Sara Krasne, an archivist, looked at New York records for traces.

The crucial clue was that Washington had bought Hercules as a young man from another Virginia planter named John Posey. We know that William Lee, the general’s body servant during the war, continued to use the surname of his first owner throughout his life. Had Hercules done the same?

The New York city directory for 1812 listed a black man named Hercules Posey living on Orange Street. On 15 May of that year, that Posey died of consumption. The death record stated that he was sixty-four years old and had been born in Virginia, which is a reasonable match for what little we know about Hercules the cook.

As described in this blog post, New York City archivists found evidence from a few years later that Posey’s address was in a neighborhood of black workers.

I’m adding another breadcrumb to this cook’s trail. The 1812 directory listed Posey as a laborer. The 1808 edition of Longworth’s American Almanac: New York Register and City Directory listed him at another address on Orange Street, and identified him as a cook.

ADDENDUM: After I wrote about this posting on Twitter, Sara Krasne replied that she and Ramin Ganeshram had just found Hercules Posey listed as a cook in an 1807 New York city directory.

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?

No Birthday Cake for George Washington

This month Scholastic published a book about Hercules, the Washingtons’ cook at Mount Vernon and Philadelphia in the 1790s.

And this week Scholastic decided to pull that book from circulation. As The Guardian reported:

A Birthday Cake for George Washington was released on 5 January and had been strongly criticized for its upbeat images and story of Washington’s cook, the slave Hercules, and his daughter, Delia.

“While we have great respect for the integrity and scholarship of the author, illustrator and editor, we believe that, without more historical background on the evils of slavery than this book for younger children can provide, the book may give a false impression of the reality of the lives of slaves and therefore should be withdrawn,” the publisher said in a statement. . . .

While notes in A Birthday Cake for George Washington from author Ramin Ganeshram and illustrator Vanessa Brantley-Newton pointed out the historical context of the 18th-century story and that Hercules eventually escaped, some critics faulted Ganeshram and Brantley-Newton for leaving out those details from the main narrative. . . .

The trade publication School Library Journal called the book “highly problematic” and recommended against its purchase. Another trade journal, Kirkus Reviews, labeled the book “an incomplete, even dishonest treatment of slavery”.

One notable detail about this publication is that the book’s editor, Andrea Davis Pinkney, is one of the industry’s most respected and active African-American editors and champions of black authors and artists. She has published many books about African-American history, including slavery. Both the author and the illustrator of the book are women of color.

Last year there was a big controversy in the children’s book world about how another picture book, A Fine Dessert, depicted a moment in the lives of a mother and child enslaved in ante-bellum South Carolina. (I wrote about an early presage of that controversy but didn’t anticipate what developed.) By that time, A Birthday Cake for George Washington was probably too far along in production to be changed in major ways.

Pinkney and her colleagues clearly anticipated some complaints about how the new book portrayed slavery and prepared online essays explaining their choices. That makes Scholastic’s decision to reverse course and pull the book—on a weekend, yet—even more striking.