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.

“I would have her taste the exalted pleasure of the universal applause”

Yesterday I wrote about how in 1774 the Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson (1703–1784) invited the historian Catharine Macaulay into his house at Bath, assigned her the lease, and adopted her daughter as his heir.

Some of Macaulay’s admirers looked askance at that arrangement. Not because Wilson was neglecting his parish of Walbrook in London by staying at Bath. It was rather common for older rich Anglican clerics to be absentees, so no one really complained.

Rather, on 18 Feb 1774 the Rev. Augustus Toplady, author of the “Rock of Ages” hymn, warned Macaulay about the “dapper doctor” in a letter; “beware of being seen with him in public,” Toplady wrote. “He would derive lustre from you, but, like a piece of black cloth, he would absorb the rays, without reflecting any of them back.”

Toplady’s metaphor makes an interesting note on the Joseph Wright of Derby painting shown yesterday, which plays Wilson’s black clothing off his adopted daughter’s shiny pink and blue garments.

In fact, Wilson was more than happy to publicize Macaulay’s genius. Soon the British press caught wind of the relationship between the septuagenarian minister and the fortysomething historian, both widowed. Writers began to hint that Wilson’s admiration for Macaulay was creepy. He didn’t help by organizing a public birthday celebration for her in 1777, presenting her with a gold medal, and then publishing the six odes read to her that day.

Already a patron of artists, Wilson commissioned Robert Edge Pine to paint a portrait of Macaulay holding a letter to him. Then he commissioned John Francis Moore to carve a sculpture of Clio, muse of history, based on that portrait.

To make sure no one missed the reference, Wilson had the statue (shown above) mounted on a plinth spelling out that it was “a Testimony of the high Esteem he bears to the distinguished Merit of his Friend CATHERINE MACAULAY.” The plinth also displayed quotations from her work. And it quoted from a 1775 novel titled The Correspondents, falsely rumored to be the letters of Baron Lyttleton (1744–1779) and his future bride:

You speak of Mrs. Macaulay. She is a kind of prodigy. I revere her abilities. I cannot bear to hear her name sarcastically mentioned. I would have her taste the exalted pleasure of the universal applause. I would have statues erected to her memory; and once in every age I would wish such a woman to appear, as proof that genius is not confined to sex…but…at the same time…you’ll pardon me, we want no more than one Mrs. Macaulay.

Abigail Adams had written a fan letter to Macaulay in 1774. When she heard about that statue and inscription, she told her sons’ tutor, John Thaxter:

It gives me pleasure to see so distinguished a Genious as Mrs. Macauly Honourd with a Statue, yet she wanted it not to render her Name immortal. The Gentleman who erected it has sullied the glory of his deed by the narrow contracted Spirit which he discovers in the inscription, and if a Quotation from Lord Lyttleton (as I understand it) it is a pitty that what was meant to perpetuate the memory of that Lady should cast a shade upon the character of that Nobleman for whom heretofore I have had a great veneration. Even the most Excellent monody which he wrote upon the Death of his Lady will not atone for a mind contracted enough to wish that but one woman in an age might excell, and she only for the sake of a prodigy. What must be that Genious which cannot do justice to one Lady, but at the expence of the whole Sex?

Dr. Wilson even had the statue of Macaulay/Clio and plinth installed inside his London church in September 1778—the church he hadn’t otherwise served for years.

But within a couple of months, the relationship between Macaulay and Wilson was in tatters.

TOMORROW: A transatlantic medical career.

New Faces at the Museum of Fine Arts

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts recently acquired this portrait by Joseph Wright of Derby, one of my favorite British artists of the late eighteenth century.

On 15 Apr 1776, Wright wrote to a relative, “I am now painting a half length of D.r Wilson & his adopted Daughter Miss Macauley.” He described undertaking the job as “for reputation only” as he tried to build up a clientele in Bath.

The Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson was a distinguished London minister. He was also the main patron of historian Catharine Macaulay, who in 1763 began publishing her major work, eventually titled The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line.

Macaulay gave birth to a daughter in 1765. The next year, her obstetrician husband died. She continued to write, becoming more open about her radical politics both in pamphlets and in her history as the events she recounted approached the present day.

In 1772 the Rev. Dr. Wilson’s wife died. After that, he spent most of this time in Bath, inviting Mrs. Macaulay and her daughter to join him. In 1775 the childless widower adopted eleven-year-old Catherine Sophia Macaulay as his heir. He also granted her mother the lease of the Bath house and promised her an annuity.

The dealer of this painting, Lowell Libson and Jenny Yarker Ltd., points out that Wright showed Catherine Sophia and her adopted father reading her mother’s history, so Catharine Macaulay appears in the painting symbolically. Likewise, when Robert Edge Pine painted Macaulay the previous year, he depicted her with five volumes and a letter inscribed, “Revd. Dr: Thos Wilson Citizen of London and Rector of Wallbrook.”

The dealer also notes how Wright portrayed Catherine Sophia and Wilson as sharp contrasts: youth versus age, feminine versus masculine, pastels versus red, black, and white. Yet they are brought together in a discussion of her mother’s work.

The Wilson household was an intellectual center at Bath, and Wright hoped the minister would recommend him for more commissions. But jobs didn’t come in fast enough, and the painter returned to his home territory of Derby in 1777.

The year after that, a rift opened between the Rev. Dr. Wilson and Mrs. Macaulay.

TOMORROW: Celebrating a celebrity author.

“COME muster, my lads, your mechanical tools”

In the Second Continental Congress, Francis Hopkinson (1737–1791, shown here in a painting by Robert Edge Pine) of Pennsylvania was the artistic one.

He designed the stars-and-stripes flag for the new U.S. of A. He also designed some Continental currency, the Board of Admiralty seal, and a proposal for the Great Seal of the U.S., though that final image was ultimately sketched by Charles Thomson.

Hopkinson played and composed music, including what he said was the first secular song issued by a person born in the American colonies, “My Days Have Been so Wondrous Free” (1759). He wrote satirical verse, such as “The Battle of the Kegs” (1778).

It’s no surprise, then, that Hopkinson contributed to the debate over whether to ratify the U.S. Constitution with a song.

Pennsylvania ratified the Constitution on 10 Dec 1787, so Hopkinson didn’t need to win over his fellow citizens to the document. Rather, he aimed to convince the people of other states.

On 29 December, Hopkinson published an essay in the Pennsylvania Packet using the extended metaphor of the roof of “a certain mansion house” with thirteen rafters that “skillful architects” had determined needed a new roof lest the whole thing fall down.

He followed that up in the Pennsylvania Gazette with the words for a song originally titled “The Raising: A New Song for Federal Mechanics”:

COME muster, my lads, your mechanical tools,
Your saws and your axes, your hammers and rules;
Bring your mallets and planes, your level and line,
And plenty of pins of American pine:
  For our roof we will raise, and our song still shall be,
  Our government firm, and our citizens free.

COME, up with the plates, lay them firm on the wall,
Like the people at large, they’re the ground work of all;
Examine them well, and see that they’re sound,
Let no rotten parts in our building be found:
  For our roof we will raise, and our song still shall be,
  A government firm, and our citizens free.

NOW hand up the girders; lay each in his place,
Between them the joists, must divide all the space;
Like assemblymen, these should lie level along,
Like girders, our senate prove loyal and strong:
  For our roof we will raise, and our song still shall be,
  A government firm, over citizens free.

THE rafters now frame—your king-posts and braces,
And drive your pins home, to keep all in their places;
Let wisdom and strength in the fabric combine,
And your pins be all made of American pine:
  For our roof we will raise, and our song still shall be,
  A government firm, over citizens free.

“King-posts”! Doesn’t that smack of monarchism? But no.

OUR king-posts are judges—how upright they stand,
Supporting the braces, the laws of the land;
The laws of the land, which divide right from wrong,
And strengthen the weak, by weak’ning the strong:
  For our roof we will raise, and our song still shall be,
  Laws equal and just, for a people that’s free.

UP! Up with the rafters—each frame is a state;
How nobly they rise! their span, too, how great!
From the north to the south, o’er the whole they extend,
And rest on the walls, whilst the walls they defend:
  For our roof we will raise, and our song still shall be
  Combined in strength, yet as citizens free.

And so on until verse nine:

HUZZA! my brave boys, our work is complete,
The world shall admire Columbia’s fair seat;
Its strength against tempest and time shall be proof,
And thousands shall come to dwell under our ROOF.
  Whilst we drain the deep bowl, our toast still shall be
  Our government firm, and our citizens free.

This song was performed in Philadelphia’s parade on 4 July 1788, as reported in detail in both the Pennsylvania Gazette and Pennsylvania Packet. The author of that report was none other than Francis Hopkinson.

Henry Pelham and History Painting

While Henry Pelham’s picture of the Boston Massacre is often analyzed as a political cartoon, I suspect he was aiming for something more akin to a history painting.

British artists considered history painting—portraying a dramatic moment from history, myth, religious scripture, or even a theatrical play—as one of the highest forms of visual art at this time. In 1760 the Society of Artists of Great Britain started to award annual “premiums,” or large prizes, for paintings of subjects from British history.

At first those British history paintings were from the distant past. Robert Edge Pine won a premium in 1763 for a picture of King Canute and his mother, for instance. But there was interest in showing show more recent history, too.

Benjamin West’s first history paintings showed scenes from classical times, but in 1768 he painted a British general magnanimously saving a French prisoner, and in 1770, the same year as the Massacre, he went all out with a large canvas of the death of Gen. James Wolfe, shown in modern dress with recognizable living men around him.

In West’s first letter to John Singleton Copley in June 1767, he explained that he had been too busy to write before because “history Painting…demands the greates Cear and intelehance in History amaginable.” In that letter West offered advice about manipulating color and light to draw viewers’ eyes to the most important figures in a picture:

Thare is in Historical Painting this Same attention to be Paid. For if the Principl Carrictors are Suffred to Stand in the Croud, and not distinguished by light and shadow, or made Conspicuous by some Pece of art, So that the Eye is first Caut by the Head Carrictor of the History, and So on to the next as he bears Proportion to the Head Carrictor, if this is not observed the whole is Confusion and looses that dignity we So much admier in Great works.

Copley was Henry Pelham’s older half-brother and mentor as an artist. Compare the advice he received from West with how Pelham kept Capt. Thomas Preston’s head on the right of his image in the foreground against white space while the soldiers recede into smoke. Likewise on the left, victims’ faces stand out while much of the crowd is in shadow. Pelham used hatching to darken the background figures.

We don’t know if Copley shared West’s advice with Pelham, but we do know the half-brothers discussed history painting when Copley was first viewing art in Europe and Pelham was trying to emulate his career in Boston. “My Dear Harry,” Copley wrote to from Paris in September 1774, “as you proceed invent Historical Subjects. possess Sr. Josa. Renolds lectures as soon as you can,—some of the Book Dealers will send for them for you—and they will tell you how to proceed in the management of those great Subjects.”

In the spring of 1775 Copley wrote, “You will be glad to know in what manner a Historical composition is made, so I will give it to you, in that way I have found best myself to proceed.” He then went on for several pages.

Reaching Italy in June 1775, Copley wrote, “you should than (as I would have you) sketch any Historical Subject. . . . I don’t think a Man a perfect Artist who on occation cannot Paint History, and who knows but you have a talent in history like Raphael till you try; and if you have, your fortune is secure in this Life.”

Of course, being a history painter was Copley’s own ambition. He felt frustrated at how his American customers wanted portraits only. After settling in Britain, Copley put a lot of time and energy into creating magnificent scenes of the British army winning parts of the American War far from America.

Now I’m not saying that Henry Pelham’s 1770 Boston Massacre image was a history painting. It’s not a painting at all, of course. In Britain, West still had to argue the case that it was valid to treat a recent event in that high-brow fashion. But Pelham’s picture has more in common with that artistic genre than with contemporaneous political prints, which usually take place on a generic and often blank landscape, feature allegorical figures, and sometimes use unrealistic techniques like word balloons.

With the exception of the dog in the center foreground, no elements in Pelham’s painting are wholly symbolic or unreal. And even the dog isn’t vomiting, urinating, or doing the other distasteful things that dogs often did in political cartoons. Pelham reserved his symbolic imagery for the bottom margin, where he etched a skull and crossbones and lightning shattering a sword.

Analyzing Pelham’s print as akin to a history painting doesn’t mean treating it as an attempt to depict the shooting on King Street exactly as it happened. Artists composed their history paintings for emotional and polemical effect, as West’s advice reveals. But they did so less obviously than when they drew cartoons.

As Paul Revere copied Pelham’s image, he added the label “Butcher’s Hall” to the Customs House, thus inserting a fictional label into the scene to hammer home its political message. That moved the picture closer to cartoon form. Even then, the result was a long way from Revere’s “View of the Year 1765,” “A Warm Place—Hell,” and other political art. And Revere didn’t bother with most of the hatching.

The Privilege of Printing Parliamentary Debates

Every so often I’ve mentioned how in the 1760s the British press was wary of reporting the exact language of Parliament’s debates.

There’s no official record of the debate over the Stamp Act, for instance, or the debate to repeal it. Instead, we have to rely on private letters and memoirs, which often disagree. (Of course, official records can also disagree with letters and memoirs, and with what legislators actually said.)

In 1767 the bookseller John Almon offered a Political Register which reported on the Earl of Camden’s speech against the Declaratory Act the year before. But Almon protected himself by referring only to how “L— C——” spoke to the “B—— p———” on the issue of taxing the “A——— c——.” And he never published a second volume because of government pressure.

This portrait of London alderman Richard Oliver is another document of that debate over open government. As the website of Britain’s ArtFund explains:

In 1771 a messenger of the House arrested [John] Miller, the printer of the London Evening Post, for a breach of privilege for publishing Parliamentary debates. Richard Oliver, an Alderman of Billingsgate Ward and MP for the City[,] was a magistrate on the case together with Brass Crosby, the Lord Mayor, and Alderman John Wilkes.

The Court released Miller[,] but Crosby and Oliver were ordered to attend the House of Commons, where their actions were declared a breach of privilege. Both were committed to the Tower of London in March and not released until the end of the Parliamentary session in May.

While in the Tower both Crosby and Oliver had their portraits painted by Robert Edge Pine, a portrait and history painter who was a supporter of Wilkes and a man of strong radical sympathies. In consequence of Crosby and Oliver’s stand against the House, no attempt has since been made to prevent publication of parliamentary speeches.

The transcripts that Miller printed came from Almon. Around that same time, the government also prosecuted those two men for reprinting the Letters of Junius, winning convictions but losing the political battle. In 1774, Almon established the Parliamentary Register as a regular publication, and soon the British public felt entitled to know what Members of Parliament were saying.

This fight for press freedom was closely tied to the debate over Britain’s policy toward America. Almon supported American autonomy. Oliver was one of the few M.P.’s to vote against the Boston Port Bill in 1774 (as well as a distant cousin of Massachusetts lieutenant governor Thomas Oliver). The artist Pine, who briefly tutored Prince Demah, and the printer Miller both moved to America around the end of the war.

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.