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.

Unabashed Gossip at Fieldstone Common

Last month genealogist Marian Pierre-Louis and I gossiped by phone about children in Revolutionary Boston, the Vassall families of Cambridge, and other topics.

That was for an episode of Marian’s internet radio show and podcast Fieldstone Common, and you can hear the recording here. There are also a couple of photos of me on the episode’s webpage, and Marian’s introduction explains how I fell into historical research.

The Vassalls’ Pension and Tonight’s Lecture in Medford

On 17 June 1858, an anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the Massachusetts Historical Society held a special meeting at the house of member Henry W. Longfellow. Members shared some documents about the first owner of that house, John Vassall.

Massachusetts judge Lemuel Shaw recalled a case from early in his legal career that started when the state confiscated that property because Vassall was an absent Loyalist:

The estate having been confiscated by the Government because its owner was a Tory, when the commissioners were putting it up for sale, an old colored man, a slave, who had long served in the Vassal family, stepped forth, and said, that HE was no Tory, but a friend of liberty; and having lived on the estate all his life, he did not see any reason why he should be deprived of his dwelling. On petitioning the General Court, a resolve was framed, granting Tony a stipend of twelve pounds annually.

About 1810 (after Tony’s death), Cuba, his widow, went to the State Treasurer to get her stipend; but it was found that the resolve did not include herself. Mr. Shaw, then a member of the House, presented her petition for the continuance of the grant. It met with favor, and the annual sum was voted to Cuba during her natural life.

Shaw’s extemporaneous recollection wasn’t completely accurate, and reflects the dismissive racism of his time (referring to Tony and Cuba Vassall only by their first names), but it’s impressively close. The Massachusetts legislature responded to Tony Vassall’s petition by voting to pay “the sum of twelve pounds in specie, or a sum in bills of credit equivalent, to the said Anthony” each year.

Tony Vassall died in 1811, receiving obituaries in the Boston Repertory and Columbian Centinel. His widow Cuba petitioned for the pension to continue, and on 28 Feb 1812 the legislature granted her $40 per year. But she died only a few months later.

Tonight I’ll discuss the lives of Cuba Vassall and her mistress Penelope (Royall) Vassall at their first home in Massachusetts, the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford. Later they lived on “Tory Row” in Cambridge; Penelope was John Vassall’s aunt and neighbor, and in the early 1770s Cuba was his property. I’ll discuss how the Revolution disrupted those old relationships and sent both women off on new paths. That talk starts at 7:30. Admission is free for members, $5 for non-members.

Upcoming Talks in Sudbury and Medford

Yesterday’s posting offers a chance to mention two talks I’m looking forward to giving next month.

On Monday, 5 November, I’ll speak to the Sudbury Minutemen about “The Powder Alarm,” the militia mobilization in September 1774 that marked the end of royal authority in most of Massachusetts. That will start at 8:00 at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Sudbury.

Here’s some of Dr. Thomas Young’s commentary on the event to Samuel Adams, who had left Boston for the First Continental Congress:

That treacherous, sneaking and cowardly action, of seizing our Province powder set all the Country in a flame. Every one now feels the matter coming home to him. It gave me much pleasure to see the behavior of the people at Cambridge. When Doctr. [Joseph] Warren and I arrived there Judge [Samuel] Danforth was addressing perhaps four thousand people in the open air; and such was the order of that great assembly that not a whisper interrupted the low voice of that feeble old man from being heard by the whole Body.

And when their Committee had heard and were satisfied wt. Collo. [David] Phips’s vindication of his conduct and promise to call in his Venires and marshalled them to receive the information and take their minds upon it they kept their particular stations for three hours in the scorching sun of the hottest day we have had this summer. Such patient endurance is certainly a principal ingredient in the composition of that character emphatically stiled a Good Soldier.

Danforth was a long-time member of the Council, newly reappointed by the London government under a writ of mandamus. Phips was the sheriff of Middlesex County; the day before, he had helped the army take control of the gunpowder and two small cannon assigned to the local militia. The crowd demanded that they and other royal appointees in Cambridge resign their posts and not to support Gen. Thomas Gage’s further actions. Young’s “Venires” remark referred to another aspect of the people’s resistance: refusing jury service and shutting down the courts.

As I described yesterday, this gathering had a big effect on John Vassall and his extended family, some of whom were targets of the crowd’s anger. On Wednesday, 14 November, I’ll talk about that Vassall family, as well as another Vassall family they left behind—their enslaved household workers.

The venue for that event is the Royall House and Slave Quarters in Medford (shown above). John Vassall’s aunt Penelope grew up on that estate as the daughter of the elder Isaac Royall. When she married and moved to Cambridge, she brought an enslaved girl named Cuba. The start of the war sent Penelope Vassall fleeing with her daughter and son-in-law, though the two women eventually returned. It also left Cuba Vassall, her husband, and their children free—but they had to build lives in an uncertain new society.

“Penelope Royall, Cuba Vassall, and the Families of Tory Row” will start on 14 November at 7:30 P.M. Admission is free for R.H.S.Q. members and $5 for non-members.

The Vassalls of Cambridge

Although the title of my book-length study for the National Park Service is Gen. George Washington’s Headquarters and Home—Cambridge, Massachusetts, it gets a running start with the building of that house sixteen years before Washington arrived.

In 1759 John Vassall (1738-1797) turned twenty-one and came into his inheritance of large sugar plantations on Jamaica. He had the best upbringing that his maternal grandfather, Lt. Gov. Spencer Phips, could provide. He had a Harvard degree. And from his late father he had farmland in Cambridge with a house on the north side of the road out to Watertown.

But that house evidently wasn’t exactly what John Vassall wanted, so he had it torn down and a handsome new Georgian mansion built nearby. Over the next fifteen years Vassall added to the estate until he owned 90 acres, paying more real-estate tax than anyone else in Cambridge.

In January 1761, John Vassall married Elizabeth Oliver (1741-1807), daughter of a Dorchester man with Caribbean plantations. Seven months earlier, John’s sister Elizabeth had married Elizabeth’s brother Thomas Oliver. Miss Elizabeth Vassall thus became Mrs. Elizabeth Oliver, and Miss Elizabeth Oliver became Mrs. Elizabeth Vassall. In 1766, the Olivers moved to Cambridge, commissioning a handsome mansion of their own, now called Elmwood.

John Vassall’s life in Cambridge in the late 1760s would have given Bertie Wooster fits: he was surrounded by aunts. His father’s brother Henry Vassall and wife Penelope lived pretty much across the street. Near the college was his father’s sister, Anna Borland, and her husband. Two of his mother’s sisters, Mary Lechmere and Rebecca Lee, lived along the Watertown road to the west with their husbands. Then came another paternal aunt, Susanna Ruggles, with hers. And finally the Olivers. All those houses are still intact, too, though one has been moved. They comprise most of “Tory Row.”

This chapter describes the “Powder Alarm” of 2 Sept 1774 from the Vassalls’ point of view. Imagine being Spencer Vassall, John and Elizabeth’s ten-year-old second son, watching 4,000 men with sticks march past your house to the town common to demand that all the men appointed to the new royal Council step down. Then watching those thousands of men walk back past your house to your uncle’s, where they threatened his life until he signed a resignation under protest. Did Spencer know that his father had recently told Gov. Thomas Gage he was willing to sit on the Council as well? (That news was kept secret, and John Vassall never actually took the seat.)

The Vassalls left their Cambridge home for their Boston home that September, then left Boston for Halifax in 1775 and were in London by June 1776. With most of his wealth coming from Jamaica, John Vassall easily weathered the loss of his Massachusetts properties. In fact, the memorial inscriptions for him and his wife in St. Paul’s Church in Bristol don’t even mention Massachusetts, where both were born and where they had seven of their eight children (two dying young).

And what about Spencer Vassall? He was ready to fight in the American war. His father bought him an army commission, and he apparently entered the service in 1778 at the age of fourteen. Lt. Vassall served at Gibraltar from October 1782 to the end of the war; for the British, staving off Spain’s attempt to regain this territory was an important and heroic campaign. Vassall remained in the army through the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, serving in Flanders, Antigua, France, Spain, Holland, Ireland, and South Africa. He died leading a British attack on Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1807.

Amelia Opie wrote an epitaph to Capt. Spencer Vassall that began:

Stranger, if e’er you honor’d Sidney’s fame,
If e’er you lov’d Bayard’s reproachless name,
Then on this marble gaze with tearful eyes,
For kindred merit here with Vassall lies!…

The first chapter of the report includes more mediocre poetry about the captain, plus the family’s vital records, descriptions of John Vassall’s social and public life, details of a mysterious shooting in Lincoln, and remarks on whether Vassall was really a figure in Mercy Warren’s The Group or involved in a Loyalist disinformation campaign during the war.

Examined by the Medical Committee

In 1775, James Thacher of Barnstable was a twenty-one-year-old medical trainee eager to work for the provincial army (just as it was officially becoming the Continental Army). Years later, he adapted his journal into a memoir and left this recollection of how he applied for the position of regimental surgeon’s mate:

I proceeded, July the 3d, with alacrity to the seat of [the Massachusetts Provincial] Congress [in Watertown]. I was not disappointed in my interview with Mr. [James] Warren; my letter procured for me a favorable and polite reception. He honored me with his friendship and kind assistance, and introduced me to his lady, whose father’s family and my own have for many years been on terms of friendly intercourse.

The office which I solicit is one in the medical department, in the provincial hospital at Cambridge. A medical board, consisting of Drs. [Samuel] Holton [of Danvers, 1738-1816] and [John] Taylor [of Lunenberg and Fitchburg, born about 1734], are appointed to examine the candidates; and they added my name to the list for examination, on the 10th instant [i.e., of this month]. This state of suspense continuing several days, excites in my mind much anxiety and solicitude, apprehending that my stock of medical knowledge, when scanned by a learned committee, may be deemed inadequate, and all my hopes be blasted. . . .

On the day appointed, the medical candidates, sixteen in number, were summoned before the board for examination. This business occupied about four hours; the subjects were anatomy, physiology, surgery and medicine. It was not long after, that I was happily relieved from suspense, by receiving the sanction and acceptance of the board, with some acceptable instructions relative to the faithful discharge of duty, and the humane treatment of those soldiers who may have the misfortune to require my assistance.

Six of our number were privately rejected as being found unqualified. The examination was in a considerable degree close and severe, which occasioned not a little agitation in our ranks. But it was on another occasion, as I am told, that a candidate under examination was agitated into a state of perspiration, and being required to describe the mode of treatment in rheumatism, among other remedies he would promote a sweat, and being asked how he would effect this with his patient, after some hesitation he replied, “I would have him examined by a medical committee.”

On 15 July Thacher started work under Dr. John Warren, brother of the late Dr. Joseph Warren, at the main army hospital. That building is shown above in photo by Roger Wollstadt, via Flickr under a Creative Commons license. It was still legally owned by Penelope Vassall, a Loyalist widow. (The cars are from a more recent century.) For more on that house, see Historic Buildings of Massachusetts.