How William Browne Returned to Bermuda

William Browne was one of the last justices of the Massachusetts Superior Court under British rule.

In fact, I’m not sure he ever got to hear a full case since he arrived on the top bench just as the court-closing movement took off.

I wrote a series of posts in 2019 clearing Browne of involvement in the James Otis–John Robinson coffee house brawl of 1769, as some authors had guessed. That was another man named William Brown (actually William Burnet Brown) with ties to Salem.

Last November, the Royal Gazette newspaper in Bermuda reported some pleasantly surprising William Browne news:

A historical treasure valued at $30,000 depicting an 18th-century governor now has a place of pride at the Bermuda Historical Society after a surprise donation.

A portrait of William Browne from his days as a student at Harvard University has gone from a Pennsylvania home to the walls of the society’s headquarters on Queen Street in Hamilton. . . .

William Browne, originally from Salem, Massachusetts, was a judge whose political sympathies ran counter to the American Revolution against the British.

He ended up being forced out and his property was seized — but the British Prime Minister, Lord North, appointed him to govern Bermuda, where he served from 1782 to 1788.

Mr Bermingham said the society’s acquisition of the painting began this June with a one-line e-mail from Judi Wilson from Pennsylvania, asking if the BHS was interested in a gift of a Joseph Blackburn painting of Mr Browne.

The painting was being donated by Ms Wilson’s mother, Judith Herdeg, from Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

The family had researched the figure in their painting and discovered from a lecture at the Winterthur Museum, Library and Gardens in Delaware that Bermuda lacked a portrait of the governor.

Ms Wilson told the society: “As my mother’s health has declined, she was insistent that Mr Browne should find a home where he will finally be truly appreciated and honoured for his role in his world.”

As governor, Browne welcomed Loyalist refugees and then lobbied the imperial government to make Bermuda a free port, allowing trade with the new U.S. of A. He retired from being governor in 1788, traveling to London to seek compensation for his own property losses in the war. Browne spent the last years of his life in Britain.

“Your wish that the alliance between our son and your daughter were completed”

As I quoted yesterday, in early 1748 the Maine grandees Sir William Pepperrell and Samuel Waldo exchanged letters reassuring each other that their children wanted to get married.

Andrew Pepperrell’s long delay in setting a date with Hannah Waldo was starting to cause talk in Boston, as Samuel Waldo hinted in a 20 March letter:

I hope all impediments to a consummation will soon end in their mutual happiness, and to the satisfaction of their respective friends, as well as the mortification of those who are foes to every one. . . . though I have no reason to suspect his honor in the pending affair, yet the delay (the consequence of which is not to be foreseen) must be very disagreeable to us. Your own concern for the issue of it will excuse my anxiety for the future welfare as well as present peace and honor of my daughter, toward which it is my duty to contribute my best endeavors.

Hannah’s sister Lucy Waldo had married Isaac Winslow; they and their children appear above in a portrait by Joseph Blackburn now at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Winslow wrote from Boston several times that spring passing on his sister-in-law Hannah’s regards to the man who was supposed to marry her, as on 9 May:

I had the pleasure of drinking your health last evening at my father Waldo’s, about 10 o’clock. It was at that time when your dear Miss Hannah drank the toast, with the usual becoming blush on her countenance. She desired me to send you her compliments

Winslow also suggested various trips between Boston and Kittery that would bring the young people together. But Andrew Pepperrell never suggested a firm date for those trips, either.

Finally on 3 Sept 1748, the engagement was formally announced in the Kittery meetinghouse. Usually that meant the wedding was only weeks away.

But then Andrew complained of a lingering fever. And he undertook a new shipping project. His father wrote on 16 December, “If Andrew would go and be married, I would willingly undertake one winter journey more; but he has got a vessel which he will endeavor to fit out this winter, contrary to my advice, which I am afraid will make him sick again.”

Waldo replied:

I should think that could stand in no competition with the grand affair of a settlement for life, which he has been now nearly two years engaged in, and it gives me no small concern, as the honor of either of the parties, as well as my own, are engaged therein, it should be seemingly in suspense; the many rascally stories that are industriously bruited gives great amusement to some ill-natured persons among us, and no small chagrin to the friends of either party.

Still the months dragged on. On 20 Feb 1749, Winslow wrote to his father-in-law Waldo, who was then in London:

The affair with Mr. P———ll & Miss remains much as you left It I have hitherto omitted saying any Thing of it as I’ve been at a Loss what to say; & Miss Hannah has been of Opinion yt. it was best to be silent on ye. Affair at present. Every post almost has brot. some apology for his not coming & Mr. [Nathaniel] Sparhawk still thinks favourably of him; A short time must I think determine his Intentions

The next month, Sir William wrote to Waldo:

Mrs. Pepperrell joins with me in your wish that the alliance between our son and your daughter were completed, which I do think would be a satisfaction to all their friends, and a means of putting a stop to the talk of their enemies, as there are none without some. As I have often urged him to finish the affair, and he has declined to let me know the time designated, I have no thoughts of mentioning it to him again.

But other people were definitely still talking about the situation.

TOMORROW: Clustering around young Andrew.

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.

Visiting William Carpenter at the Worcester Art Museum

This is Ralph Earl’s portrait of William Carpenter, an English lad about twelve years old in 1779. It’s not the most graceful painting, but it conveys a lot of personality. It’s also one of many pieces of visual evidence that the preferred hairstyle for British and American boys in the 1770s was, alas, the mullet.

William Carpenter lives at the Worcester Art Museum, which has just reopened its grand front doors and is offering free admission in July and August.

Here are articles on the museum from the Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette. Its Early American Art collection includes paintings by John Singleton Copley, Joseph Badger, Joseph Blackburn, and the mind-blowing Edward Savage.