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• Date: 1893
• Sculptor: George Edwin Bissell
• Medium & size: Bronze, 9 feet on a 6-foot pedestal.
• Location: Trinity Church graveyard, facing Broadway.

Last week I posted on Abraham de Peyster, whose sculpture was commissioned by his great-great-great-grandson John Watts DePeyster. The sculpture we’re looking at this week is by the same sculptor, was commissioned by the same man – this time to honor his grandfather.

John Watts, Jr. (1749-1836), was the son of an important colonial official and of Anne DeLancey, member of a prominent family commemorated in the name of the street that leads to the Williamsburg Bridge.

Young John was born in New York and took his degree from King’s College in 1769. By his early twenties, he served as Royal Recorder. In 1775 Watts Sr., a royal official and a Loyalist (Tory), fled to England. New York confiscated his large estate and his Manhattan townhouse, banished him, and issued a bill of attainder against his family.

In the “Didn’t Know That!” department: a bill of attainder states that a person’s descendants are “tainted”, i.e., that they are corrupted merely by fact of their parentage or relations. No individual trials are necessary in order to condemn them. Bills of attainder were frequently used in Britain well into the eighteenth century. They are explicitly forbidden by the United States Constitution. Back to our story:

New York City was occupied by the British from 1776 to 1783. Not surprisingly, patriotic residents of the city and state bitterly hated Americans who chose to be Loyalists. Some of Alexander Hamilton’s earliest law cases were attempts to have the New York State legislature’s rulings against Loyalists overturned, on the basis that they contravened the terms of the peace treaty ending the war with Britain. (See this post.) In 1784, the year after the British finally evacuated New York City, Watts Jr. and his brother applied to have the attainder against their family revoked and their property returned. They were granted permission to have it back … but only if they purchased it.

Watts Jr. became the only former royal official in New York to hold state and federal office after the war. He served as an assemblyman in the state legislature (1791-1793) and as a U.S. Congressman (1793-1795). In 1806, he became the first judge in Westchester County.

The orphanage and this sculpture

Watts Jr. and his wife, another DeLancey, had eleven children. His wife and ten of the children predeceased him. One of his grandsons was adopted by his friend, the wealthy John George Leake. When the grandson inherited from Leake but died soon after, Watts Jr. decided to use the Leake inheritance to endow an orphanage. The Leake and Watts Orphan Home, established in 1831 on the Rose Hill estate, operates today as Leake and Watts Services. John Watts DePeyster, grandson of Watts Jr., commissioned this sculpture as a memorial to Watts Jr. when the orphanage moved from Manhattan to Yonkers. It stands in the graveyard of Trinity Church, of which Watts Jr. was an active member.

More

• I am indebted for the details of this post to Trinity Church’s website, which has quite a thorough biography of Watts, and to the Daytonian in Manhattan post on Watts Jr.
• Bissell’s other works outdoors in New York City are Chester Alan Arthur and Abraham de Peyster.
• Since 2019, I’ve been posting New York’s outdoor sculptures in chronological order on my Instagram feed. My current series of blog posts are on outdoor sculptures in New York City that I haven’t written about over the past twenty years.
• In Getting More Enjoyment from Sculpture You Love, I demonstrate a method for looking at sculptures in detail, in depth, and on your own. Learn to enjoy your favorite sculptures more, and find new favorites. Available on Amazon in print and Kindle formats.
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