Anishanslin on The Painter’s Fire in Boston, 23 June

On Wednesday, 23 June, Zara Anishanslin will speak at the Massachusetts Historical Society on her new book, The Painter’s Fire: A Forgotten History of the Artists Who Championed the American Revolution.

Zara Anishanslin is a professor at the University of Delaware. Her last book was Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World, winner of The Library Company of Philadelphia’s first Biennial Book Prize.

I got to hear Prof. Anishanslin speak about The Painter’s Fire at the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife last month. Previous studies of American-born painters in the Revolutionary world have focused on men like John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West, and Ralph Earl—all important artists but also Loyalist in that conflict.

In contrast, Anishanslin looks at three artists who actively supported the new American republic in one way or another: Robert Edge Pine, Prince Demah, and Patience Wright. Pine was a British native, Demah was born enslaved, and Wright was a woman working in wax rather than portraiture, so their lives expand the traditional scope of artists’ studies in other ways as well. Their careers also intersected in interesting ways.

When I first wrote about Prince Demah back in 2006, all that I knew was his first name, that he was enslaved to Christian Barnes in Marlborough, and that she wanted to get him some training as a painter. Research by Paula Bagger and others revealed Demah’s transatlantic career, service in the Continental Army, and more. It’s exciting to see those facts come into the light.

The talk is the society’s Annual Jack Grinold Lecture in American Art and Architecture. It will begin with a reception for in-person attendees at 5:30 P.M. Prof. Anishanslin’s talk (and the online stream) will begin at 6:00. The event is free to society members and online attendees, $10 for others. Register here.

“The Spies in Henry Barnes’s House” at Hingham, 17 Nov.

Yesterday I wrote about Ens. Henry DeBerniere, the young mapmaking army officer.

He turned up at Henry and Christian Barnes’s house in Marlborough on 1 Mar 1775, along with Capt. William Brown.

Those two officers were “The Spies in Henry Barnes’s House” that I’ll speak about on the afternoon of Sunday, 17 November, in the Hingham Historical Society’s Revisiting The American Revolution series.

Dr. Samuel Curtis will also show up in my talk, just as he showed up at the Barnes house that night, trying to ferret out information on DeBerniere and Brown. So he was spying, too.

I may even bring in Gib Speakman and Prince Demah because of their ties to the Barnes family, even though I can’t link them to events of that night.

Why, you might ask, am I delivering this talk in Hingham rather than in Marlborough, where all the action happened?

Because another player in that night’s drama was Chrisy Arbuthnot, an orphaned ten-year-old niece living with the Barneses. She had come to them from Hingham.

In addition, Prince Demah’s portraits of Henry and Christian Barnes are now among the treasures of the Hingham Historical Society.

Like other talks in this series, this presentation will be accessible in person and online, as part of the whole series or on its town. Admission (which isn’t cheap) helps to fund the society.

A Likely Addition to Phillis Wheatley’s Works

Prof. Wendy Raphael Roberts of the University of Albany has announced the discovery of a previously unknown poem by Phillis Wheatley, “On the Death of Love Rotch.”

Or, as this press release from the university says, Roberts found a poem in the 1782 commonplace book of Mary Powel Potts (1769–1787) of Pennsylvania, the lines dated to 1767 and attributed to “A Negro Girl about 15 years of age.”

Since we know of only one teen-aged girl of African descent writing poetry in British North America at the time, Phillis Wheatley is the most likely candidate.

Of course, a few years ago we assumed that the black portrait artist advertising in Boston newspapers 250 years ago this season had to be Scipio Moorhead, since he was the only possibility to appear in the published sources. (In fact, one of the main sources about him is a poem by Phillis Wheatley.)

But then Paula Bagger put together manuscript sources (including letters I quoted back here) to bring out the life of Prince Demah, now almost certainly the portraitist in those advertisements.

Thus, while it would be unlikely that two African girls were writing poetry in New England in 1767, it’s not impossible.

There are, however, some additional clues pointing to Wheatley:

• Wheatley often wrote memorial verse like this elegy, particularly when she was starting out. She didn’t necessarily know the people she wrote about.
• The title and date of this poem match the details of Love (Macy) Rotch, a Quaker on Nantucket, who died 14 Nov 1767.
• Wheatley wrote “To a Gentleman on his Voyage to Great Britain for the Recovery of his Health” to Love Rotch’s son Joseph, Jr., reportedly in or before 1767. (Boston newspapers reported in March 1773 that he had died in England.)
• Love Rotch’s other sons, William and Francis, owned the ship Dartmouth, which carried the first edition of Wheatley’s poems back to Boston in 1773.
• We know Wheatley’s poems circulated in manuscript and commonplace books among Philadelphia Quaker women like Mary Powel Potts.

And here’s a new bread crumb: In the 25 Apr 1765 Boston News-Letter and several other newspapers that spring, Love Rotch’s husband and two of her sons, William and Joseph, Jr., asked anyone indebted to the late John Morley to pay up “at the store of Nathaniel Wheatley, in King-Street, Boston.” They authorized Wheatley to collect money due to Morley’s widow. That shows a close business relationship between the Wheatley and Rotch households a couple of years before Phillis wrote her poems.

There are still some mysteries. For one:

The only thing that didn’t make sense to Roberts was the copyist’s claim that Love Rotch was the poet’s mistress, since it was widely known that Susanna Wheatley held that role.

Roberts apparently suggests that the Wheatley family loaned or rented Phillis to the Rotch family. That strikes me as a more complex, less likely explanation than that Potts or her teacher misunderstood the origin of the poem and assumed it reflected the author’s lament for someone she knew well.

Another open question:

Roberts found another anonymous poem in the Potts book that she believes Wheatley wrote but can only speculatively attribute to her. Titled “The Black Rose,” it mourns the death of a Black woman named Rose and uses theology to critique a society that refused to mourn the enslaved and oppressed. It would be the only known elegy Wheatley wrote for a Black woman.

Also a mystery in the press release is the actual text of these poems. Those will presumably appear with Prof. Roberts’s analysis in the upcoming Early American Literature article. On Thursday, 26 January, at 6:00 P.M., the Library Company of Philadelphia will host a virtual talk by Roberts on “A Newly Unearthed Poem by Phillis Wheatley (Peters) and the Future of the Wheatley Canon.”

“A Letter was left by some unknown Person”

In 1770, the Boston town meeting named Henry Barnes as one of a small group of businesspeople who were openly defying the town’s non-importation agreement.

Barnes was unusual in that group because his shop and main business were off in rural Marlborough, where he also oversaw some small manufacturing enterprises.

In a long letter written over June and July that I’ve been quoting, Henry’s wife Christian Barnes told her friend Elizabeth Smith how their neighbors tried to pressure him into backing down: public meetings (official and unofficial), window-breaking, not one but two effigies.

“But still finding that their malace had no effect,” Christian wrote, “they made a bold push and dropped an incendiary letter.”

Henry Barnes immediately sent a copy of the letter to Thomas Hutchinson at his home in Milton. The acting governor convened his Council at Cambridge on 25 June and showed them the letter. The Councilors asked Hutchinson to summon Barnes to another meeting.

On 28 June, Barnes brought “the original Incendiary Letter [and] his Oath annexed to authenticate the receipt.” Unable to stall any longer, the Council advised Hutchinson to issue a proclamation about it:

Whereas on the 21st. Inst. a Letter was left by some unknown Person at the House of Henry Barnes Esq. of Marlborough, directed to him, threatening to fire his Shop and destroy all his substance that he hath on ye Earth, to take his Body & Tar it & if nothing else will do but death he shall certainly have it if he did not shut up his Shop and forbear Selling and importing of Goods; to the receiving of which Letter in manner as aforesaid the said Henry Barnes made solemn oath…

The province offered a £50 reward for any information about the “unknown Person.”

The Barneses already felt besieged, and they were hearing bad news from friends in Boston. In her letter to Smith, Christian Barnes wrote about other supporters of the royal government being attacked:

• “one of the McMasters had been carted out of town” (described here).
• “it was everybody’s opinion poor [Capt. Thomas] Preston would be hanged.”
• “Mr. [Henry] Hulton’s windows had been broke and the family had fled to the castle” (described here).

Barnes told Smith:

You may judge what sleep I had that night, and, indeed, ever since we have sleept in such a manner that it can hardly be called rest. It is the business of the evening to see the firearmes loaded, and lights properly placed in the store and house; and this precaution we have taken ever since we received the letter.

As for Marlborough’s response, on 30 July the Boston Gazette published a dispatch from that town with this to say about the warning:

Afterwards Barns pretends to have found a letter, threatning of him, and has sent, to the selectmen for their assistance to discover the authors of so vile a thing, and after the most close search, and considering all circumstances of said letter, are of opinion that the same was hatched by Barns’s own party—and one of the Selectmen went and told Barns so; whereupon Barns raged furiously and said, “Then you think I swore falsly do you?” Afterwards Barnes pretends he expect a mob, whether from the horror of his own conscience, or the phrenzy of a Don Quixote and a Squire Sancho, is not said…

The modern term for this political tactic is, of course, “gaslighting.”

TOMORROW: Naming “the perpetrator of all this mischief”?

(The portrait of Christian Barnes above was painted by Prince Demah, who grew up enslaved in the Barnes household. She wrote about his talent for drawing portraits in 1769, and in late 1770 Henry Barnes took Demah to London for training. The artist later returned to Boston and advertised as a portraitist. Demah’s portraits of Christian and Henry Barnes are now owned by the Hingham Historical Society.)

“Creativity in Bondage” Discussion in Hingham, 7 Feb.

On Sunday, February 7, the Abigail Adams Birthplace and the Hingham Public Library will present a program on “Creativity in Bondage: Slave Artist Prince Demah and Writer Briton Hammon.”

The event description says:

Prince Demah’s portraits of his owners, Christian and Henry Barnes, now in the collections of the Hingham Historical Society, are among the earliest known paintings by an African-American. Demah, who lived in Boston but had ties to the South Shore, received training in London and was described as a creative “genius.” Hingham resident Paula Bagger, who recently co-authored an article on Demah for The Magazine Antiques, will discuss her research into his life and work. Ms. Bagger is a member of the board of directors of the Hingham Historical Society and a practicing attorney.

Briton Hammon, an eighteenth-century slave belonging to General John Winslow of Marshfield (later of Hingham), is considered the author of one of the first published American slave autobiographies. His 1760 narrative recounts his confrontations with Native Americans and capture by Spanish sailors while on a sea voyage, and the ensuing thirteen-year ordeal in which he faced battle, torture, and imprisonment. Aaron Dougherty, executive director of Marshfield’s 1699 Winslow House and Cultural Center, will speak about Hammon’s life experiences and writings, and will discuss how narratives such as his eventually helped fuel the abolitionist movement.

The event’s moderator will be Michelle Marchetti Coughlin, author of One Colonial Woman’s World: The Life and Writings of Mehetabel Chandler Coit.

This program is scheduled to run from 3:00 to 5:00 P.M. in the the Whiton Room of the Hingham Public Library, 66 Leavitt Street. That will include time for audience questions and discussion. Admission is free and open to the public.

An American Artist in London

Yesterday I quoted a Boston News-Letter advertisement about a black man making portraits in Boston in 1773. I also noted how Prince Demah (Barnes) painted William Duguid in February 1773, according to a note on the back of that portrait, acquired just a few years ago by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

We also have a May 1773 letter from Christian Barnes of Marlborough to her friend Elizabeth (Murray Campbell Smith) Inman to sit for a portrait by her former house-servant Prince the next time she was in Boston. So Prince Demah (Barnes) was definitely working as a painter in Boston in early 1773. How did he come to that business?

According to Christian Barnes, her husband Henry (shown here, courtesy of the Hingham Historical Society) bought Prince before 1769 “not solely with a View of Drawing my Picture but I believe he has some design of improving his Genius in painting.” She described Prince as the son of another family slave named Daphney and “Born in our family.”

As noted by Amelia Peck and Paula M. Bagger in the current issue of The Magazine Antiques, Prince therefore appears to be the child mentioned in this record of a baptism at Trinity Church in Boston on 23 May 1745:

Dafney an adult & Prince negroes.

In that case, Prince was at least in his early twenties when Henry Barnes acquired him from relatives.

In 1769 and 1770 Christian wrote to her friend Elizabeth Smith in London about Prince’s progress as a portraitist. She sent a sample of his work to Smith, and speculated about whether “Mr. Copling” (John Singleton Copley) might train him. So we know the Barneses were seeking opportunities for Prince to learn more.

In those same months Henry Barnes was under attack as one of the few holdout importers of goods from Britain, contrary to Boston’s non-importation agreement. In early 1770 he was called an enemy of his country, threatened with tar and feathers, and found his horse had been attacked that way. That hostility calmed down after Parliament revoked the Townshend duties (except for the tea tax) and removed troops from Boston.

In autumn 1770 Henry Barnes sailed for London, as reported in the 11 October Boston News-Letter. Peck and Bagger report that in February 1771 Barnes wrote to Elizabeth Smith that he’d found an art tutor for Prince in London: “Mr. Pine who has taken him purely for his genius.”

Peck and Bagger conclude that was probably Robert Edge Pine (1730-1788), an established portraitist. Some authors suggest that Pine himself had African ancestry through his father, the engraver John Pine, but that tradition seems to be based simply on how he looks in one engraving, not on his genealogy. Barnes actually wrote that he didn’t want Prince to “converse with any of his own colour here” in Britain. Ironically, while Henry and Christian Barnes eventually became Loyalists, Pine went the opposite way: after the war he moved from his lifelong home in London to Philadelphia.

Henry Barnes returned to North America with Elizabeth Smith and her relatives in the summer of 1771, as stated in the 15 July Boston Evening-Post. Evidently he brought Prince Demah back as well. It wasn’t until the next year that James Somerset’s case made slavery unenforceable in Britain, but Barnes might have emancipated Prince or come to some sort of understanding. The young man appears to have acted as an independent craftsman in the following years.

Thus, Prince Demah had indeed received a little assistance from “one of the best Masters in London” before advertising his skills in Boston, though a few months in 1771 was hardly comprehensive training. Peck and Bagger report that X-ray analysis of the three portraits linked to Prince Demah shows that he used a different technique while painting Duguid than appears inside the picture of Christian Barnes, which is almost certainly a copy of one by Copley. Frankly, I find the body proportions of the Duguid painting to be awkward, but the costume and setting are more ambitious.

All this means that Prince Demah traveled to London to make artistic connections before Phillis Wheatley made her famous trip in 1773, and before Copley first visited the imperial capital in 1774. Indeed, his experiences there might have helped to inspire their journeys.

The Mysteries of Scipio Moorhead

On 7 Jan 1773 and nine more times that year, the Boston News-Letter ran this advertisement:

At Mr. M’Lean’s, Watch-Maker, near the Town-House, is a Negro Man whose extraordinary Genius has been assisted by one of the best Masters in London; he takes Faces at the lowest Rates. Specimens of his Performances may be seen at said Place.

Some authors have linked that ad to Scipio Moorhead, the only black artist known to be active in Boston around that time.

However, Eric Slauter, author of the article “Looking for Scipio Moorhead” in Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World, thinks that his subject was still an adolescent at that time, not “a Negro Man.”

According to the sources Slauter has lined up, Scipio Moorhead was baptized as a child in King’s Chapel on 11 June 1760. He was still enslaved to the Moorhead family in late 1773 and 1774, and advertised in the 2 Jan 1775 Boston Gazette as “a likely Negro Lad” in an estate sale to be held ironically “not far from Liberty Tree.” (Slauter acknowledges that a late 1774 estate inventory listed “a Negro man, named Scipio,” but the preponderance of evidence suggests he was still in his teens.)

Slauter also notes that the only evidence we have for Scipio Moorhead as an artist is Phillis Wheatley’s poem “To S.M., A Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works.” A note on an early copy gives that painter’s full name, and Wheatley addressed another poem to the Moorhead family. But no one else mentioned Scipio Moorhead’s art in surviving documents, and no known examples have survived.

Many people assume the portrait of Wheatley engraved for the frontispiece of her book, shown above, was based on a painting by Scipio Moorhead, but that’s just a guess based on their acquaintance. All we know for sure is that the Countess of Huntingdon suggested having a picture of Wheatley as the frontispiece, and, since the countess was supporting the printing, the Wheatley family adopted the idea in the spring of 1773.

We now have strong evidence of a black portrait artist working in Boston in early 1773 with three paintings ascribed to him: Prince Demah (Barnes). The one portrait signed with his name—showing Scottish importer William Duguid is dated “February 1773,” just weeks after that newspaper ad first ran. It therefore appears that Prince Demah, not Scipio Moorhead, was that “Negro Man” painting “Faces at the lowest Rates.” And Prince Demah may also have painted Phillis Wheatley.

TOMORROW: Training in London.

Discovering Prince Demah, an African-American Artist

Back in 2006 and 2008 I wrote about a young black artist mentioned in the letters of Christian Barnes, a Marlborough merchant’s wife (shown here). All I knew about him was the given name “Prince.”

Paula Bagger, working with the Hingham Historical Society, has found out a lot more. The society owns portraits of Christian Barnes and her husband Henry, and we know that she sat for Prince to paint her. Then it turned out that the Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a portrait of William Duguid in the same style that’s signed on the back “Prince Demah Barnes.”

Bagger just wrote an article about the artist for the historical society’s blog. And in the January 2015 issue of The Magazine Antiques, she and Amelia Peck of the Metropolitan Museum of Art discuss all three known oil portraits by Prince.

On the blog Bagger filled in more about the artist’s life:

Prince enjoyed a short professional painting career before the Revolution changed the lives of Christian, Henry, and Prince. Christian and Henry fled [as Loyalists,] and Prince enlisted in the Massachusetts militia as a free man–Prince Demah (no more “Barnes”)–and served as a matross. He died, likely of smallpox or other disease, in March 1778. As “Prince Demah, limner,” he wrote his will, leaving all he had to [his mother] Daphney.

Christian Barnes’s letters show that Prince Demah practiced with both oils and pastels. She tried to line up friends to sit for him, and there are several years between when she first mentioned his talent and the disruption of the war. So there might well be more portraits by this newly identified African-American artist and Continental soldier, perhaps in private hands or historical society collections. Bagger and her colleagues are on the hunt!

More on Prince, the “Black Limner”

Back in November 2006, I quoted some remarks from Christian Barnes of Marlborough to her friend Elizabeth ((Murray) Campbell) Smith about a young black slave named Prince who was showing remarkable ability as a portrait artist.

Yesterday I revisited that collection of letters at the Library of Congress, and found a little more about Prince. On 22 July 1773, Barnes wrote again to her friend, now Elizabeth (((Murray) Campbell) Smith) Inman:

I had a favor to ask which I must now petition you will grant me which is that if you have an hour to spare at any time when you are in Boston you will allow Prince to make some alteration in the Coppy he has taken from your Picture which he says he cannot do but from the life and Please to give him any directions you think proper as to the Dress of the Head

So in that year Prince was no longer living with Barnes in Marlborough but in Boston. He might have copied the portrait of Inman created by John Singleton Copley, shown on the cover of her biography above.

Then came the war. Barnes and her husband moved to Britain while Inman remained in Massachusetts. On 16 June 1783 Barnes renewed their correspondence with a letter from Bristol, which she closed this way:

P.S. pray let me know if good old Daphney be living and whether she is capible of giting her living. Her son I hear is provided for and so we shall all be in time

Daphney was Prince’s mother, so that postscript implies that by then Prince had died. And as yet I’ve found no trace of him in any other source.

Prince: Mrs. Barnes's "Black Limner"

Christian Barnes was a merchant’s wife in Marlborough. She was good friends with Elizabeth Smith, a wealthy widow who had started out as an immigrant shopkeeper and worked and married her way into a large estate in Milton. Apparently the two households' enslaved workers had family links as well.

On 20 Nov 1769, Barnes wrote to Smith, who was on a trip home to Great Britain, about a slave named Prince, who was showing unusual artistic talent:

Daphneys Son Prince is here and I am siting to him for my Picture he has taken a Coppy of my Brothers extreemly well and if mine has the least resemblance I shall have a strong inclination to send it to you purely for the curiosity tho it is nothing but a Daub for he has not proper materials to work with.

Three days later, Barnes added that her husband had bought Prince

not solely with a View of Drawing my Picture but I believe he has some design of improving his Genius in painting and as soon as he has procured material you shall have a sample of his performance. . . .

Daphney appears to be much better reconciled to a State of Slavery since her sons arrival upon the whole I believe there is not a Happier Set of Negros in any Kitchen in the Provence and so much for my Domesticks of the lower order.

Barnes continued to mention Prince and his drawing in letters to Smith, saying that friends “would Esteem it as a Curiosity.” In March 1770 she wrote:

my Limner…is a most surprizing instance of the force of natural Genius for without the least instruction or improvment he has taken several Faces which are thought to be very well done he has taken a Coppy of my Picture which I think has more of my resemblance then Coplings

Barnes obviously meant painter John Singleton Copley, whose portrait of Smith is now at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Barnes's words imply that Copley had painted her as well, but I can't find any confirmation of that. (Copley's portrait of a black man, probably painted in England after the war, appears above, for lack of anything better.) Back to Prince:

He is now taking his own face which I will certainly send you as it must be valued as a curiosity by any Friend you shall please to bestow it upon. . . .

We are at great Loss for proper materials. at Present he has worked only with Crayons and them very bad ones and we are so ignorant as not to know what they are to be laid on. He has hetherto used Blue Paper but I think something better may be found out.

If you should meet in your Travils with any one who is a Proficient in the art I wish you would make some inquerys into these perticulas for People in general think Mr. Copling will not be willing to give him any instruction and you know there is nobody else in Boston that does any thing at the Business. . . .

You Laugh now and think this is one of Mr. Barnes Scheems, but you are quite mistaken it is intirely my own, and as it is the only one I ever ingag’d in I shall be greatly disapointed if it does not succeed, I cannot dismis this Subject without acquainting you that this this surprizing Genius has every qualification to render him a good Servent, Sober deligent and Faithfull and I believe as he was Born in our family he is of Tory Principle but of that I am not quite so certain as he had not yet declar’d himself.

Prince finished Barnes’s portrait in early May, and on 11 May she shipped it to England with Capt. James Scott. Again, she wrote with a mix of what seems like genuine admiration but also utter condescension for this young artist she had come to own:

I freely own that my expectations are rather heightened then deminished tho I am not so far determin’d to be at any expence on his account till I find other Peoples Judgment concur with mine tis for this reason I have desired you to give your opinion freely and you may depend upon it I will be govern’d by your advice. for supposing he is not qualified for a Painter he may be otherwise made a very usefull Servant.

Perhaps there are more Barnes letters (these come from the Library of Congress) that finish this story. When the war began, the Barnes family left Massachusetts. Smith, then remarried to Ralph Inman, remained. I have no idea what happened to Prince, his mother Daphney, or his artistic work.