Jefferson or Not?
As this press release acknowledges, no one is on record as thinking this is a painting of Jefferson until its current owner.
Delapierre painted an early printing of De la Caisse d’Escompte on the desk of the man in the portrait. That book was authored principally by Mirabeau, but the man obviously isn’t that jowly count. The book’s other authors included Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours (who later settled in Delaware), and Étienne Clavière.
Jefferson knew all four men and admired their book. However, his own book, Notes on the State of Virginia, was published in Paris at the same time, and normally a painter would portray an author with his own work.
The website argues that letters from John Adams’s family hint at an early, previously unidentified Jefferson portrait. I think we can read those letters to indicate that the Adams family picked up Jefferson’s portrait from Boston native Mather Brown in 1786, liked it so much they wanted a copy, and therefore returned it to Brown’s studio for duplication before the end of the year.
Furthermore, I think the portrait looks a lot like Brissot, one of the authors of that book on the desk. The website compares this painting to later portraits of Jefferson, but doesn’t line both up against later portraits of Brissot. What do you think?
