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For more on the Worcester Art Museum, see the first post in this series. In this post we look at the earliest American paintings at the WAM, and see how they compare with the European ones that we’ve been looking at over the past four weeks.

This post is available as a video at https://youtu.be/gEyVY5ICH1g.

Ca. 1670: Freake-Gibbs Painter

The stark black and white of John Freake’s outfit is reminiscent of those worn in of Cornelis van der Voort’s husband and wife portraits of 1617 (see this post). As with the Dutch burghers, the sober colors are worn for religious reasons: Boston, home of the Freakes, was Puritan territory. Like the Dutch burghers, John and Mary manage to display their wealth anyway, via features such as John’s elaborate lace collar. His wife (isn’t she daring!) wears a few red ribbons on her sleeve.

The style of the Freake-Gibbs Painter is very different from van der Voort’s, with distinct outlines rather than carefully three-dimensional modeling. Look at the way the hands are represented here, as opposed to the two Dutch paintings. What’s going on?

Scholars have proposed that the Freake-Gibbs Painter was an untrained artist (i.e., a folk artist), or an itinerant Dutch painter from New York, or a painter in the Elizabethan English style. According to the WAM’s site, at the moment scholars are leaning toward the Elizabethan option, because Elizabethan painters focused on linear forms and surface ornamentation.

Nicholas Hilliard, whose portraits of Elizabeth I and her contemporaries appear in pretty much every major survey of art history, said: “Forget not therefore that the principal part of painting or drawing after the life consisteth in the truth of the line . . . for the line without shadow showeth all to a good judgment, but shadow without line showeth nothing.” The Elizabethan style of painting began to fade in England when Anthony Van Dyck arrived in 1632, but persisted decades more in English outposts such as Boston.

The Freake-Gibbs painter produced about ten portraits, all dated 1670-1674 and all of Bostonians. For more on him, see here.

Ca. 1680: Thomas Smith

Compared to the Freake family portraits, painted a decade earlier, Smith’s portrait is more three-dimensional … but there’s still some emphasis on line rather than volume. Like John Freake, Smith wears sober black, and like Freake, the lace collar shows that Smith is not a poor man. Smith adds two explicitly religious elements to his self-portrait: the skull on which his hand rests (a memento mori, reminder of death), and a poem on the paper beneath the skull that rejects this world in favor of God. (Transcribed here.) Judging from the naval battle visible through the window, Smith at some point had a naval career.

According to the WAM’s site, this is the earliest known American self-portrait, and the only known 17th-century New England portrait by an artist who can be identified. Other artists of the period are, like the Freake-Gibbs Painter, known by the names of their sitters rather than by their own names.

Ca. 1763: Copley, John Bours

Skipping ahead 80 years: John Singleton Copley (1738-1815) grew up in Boston, and was exposed to art early. His stepfather was a painter and engraver, and by the 1750s-1760s, wealthy Bostonians owned some art. Copley was painting portraits by age 14. He soon set a new standard for portraiture in the British colonies, showing the character as well as the physical appearance of his sitters.

This portrait, painted when Copley was 25, looks informal but in fact carefully composed. His sitter relaxes and stares into space, an open book in his hand. Bours’s pose is in sharp contrast to the formality of Sarah Tyler (Mrs. Samuel Phillips Savage, also at the WAM), whose portrait Copley painted at around the same time. We learn something about each of those sitters just by how they sit in their portraits.

Even in his twenties, Copley is a virtuoso at representing textures – and he doesn’t represent them just for the sake of showing off. Bours wears a drab olive brown, but the fabric is clearly velvet, which tells us as surely as a lace collar that he’s wealthy. The Bours portrait is from the same decade as Francis Cotes’s William, Sixth Baron Craven, which we saw in this post. Copley was doing pretty well, and not just for a colonial!

Over the next few years Copley created such notable works as Paul Revere and Boy with Flying Squirrel. But relations between the American colonies and Britain were becoming increasingly tense, and in 1774, Copley decamped to London. There he studied British portraiture and painted increasingly accomplished portraits such as Portrait of a Lady (Mrs. Daniel Fort?), now at the Wadsworth Athenaeum. He never returned to America.

Ca. 1779: Savage

Bet you wouldn’t have guessed that this portrait was painted 16 years or so after Copley’s portrait of Bours! At age 18, Edward Savage (1761–1817), another Massachusetts native, decided to do a 3 x 2 foot family portrait that includes his parents, brothers, sister, and grandfather. Savage himself stands with his palette at the far left. Can’t fault his ambition … but the carefully studied heads are bizarrely large in proportion to the bodies, and the black-and-white-checkered floor seems to ripple.

By 1796, after studying with Benjamin West in London, Savage was capable of producing this portrait of George Washington with his family: a considerable improvement!

Next week: more American portraits at the Worcester Art Museum.

More

• For the Resurrecting Romanticism conference in October 2023, I’m working on a talk on art at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Columbian Exposition. One of the questions I’ll be addressing is why the organizers of the Exposition, and the painters whose works appeared there, were so very keen to surpass the buildings and exhibitions of the 1889 Paris world’s fair. To remind myself of the development of European and American painting over time, this series of posts is a quick overview of European portraits from the Renaissance to the 19th century, followed by American portraits. Eventually I’ll post on other paintings at the Worcester Art Museum.
• If the history of Western painting interests you, check out my Innovators in Painting: a 140-page survey focusing on innovations that gave painters more power to make their viewers stop, look, and think about paintings.
• Want wonderful art delivered weekly to your inbox? Check out my Sunday Recommendations list and rewards for recurring support: details here. For examples of favorite recommendations from past years, click here.