The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. IV, Part 50

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897, ed; Jewett, C. F. (Clarence F.), publisher
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Boston : Osgood
Number of Pages: 760

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1 [See Vol. II. p. 222 .- ED.]

2 [Ibid., p. 127 .- ED.]

8 [Ibid., p. 453, for Nicholas Boylston, and p. 556 for Thomas Boylston .- ED.]

4 [Ibid., p. 121 .- ED.]

5 [Ibid., p. 455 .- ED.]

6 [See Vol. II. p. 438, and III. ch. i .- ED.]

7 [Ibid., p. 68 .- ED.]

8 [Ibid., p. 519, for Thomas Hancock, and

Vol. IV. p. 5, for John Hancock .- ED.]

9 [Ibid., p. 454 .- ED.]

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THE FINE ARTS IN BOSTON.

pearl necklaces, laced waistcoats and embroidered coats, swords and cocked hats, curtains whose heavy folds, contrasting with the small heads and slen- der throats, afford a glimpse of park or fountain beyond, - these outward signs of elegant and aristocratic life were managed skilfully, giving his por- traits an air of courtly grace. His method of painting was exceedingly tedious. He used to match with his palette-knife a tint for each part of the face, thus occupying himself and the sitter a long time before he touched the canvas. We hear of one lady sitting to him fifteen or sixteen times, six hours at a time. Yet it is said on good authority that he left more than two hundred and fifty oil paintings in America, besides crayons and minia- tures,1 - all done in twenty years.

In 1771 Copley wrote that he was making a comfortable income; and two years later he owned all the land which lies between Charles, Beacon, Walnut, and Mt. Vernon streets, Louisburg Square and Pinckney Street, - about eleven acres.2 Twenty-five years later the estate had risen greatly in value, and was sold by his agent to Jonathan Mason and H. G. Otis. The price, some $18,000, did not satisfy Copley, who tried to annul the bargain, - even, as the story goes, sending his son John to Boston for this purpose. In 1774 he took a step which changed the whole course of his life. Some time previous he had painted a portrait of his half-brother, Henry Pelham, -the " Boy and the Squirrel." The picture is not dated, and accounts differ widely as to the exact year. The painter sent it to England to be exhibited at Somerset House. A letter which should have accompanied it did not arrive; and West, to whom it was consigned, could only guess it was an American picture from the wood of the stretching frame, and be- · cause the flying squirrel is an American animal. In his enthusiasm he declared the coloring worthy of Titian. The rule excluding anonymous works was waived, and the picture was received. The praise of the best judges reached the artist and his friends in America. They urged him to go to London. It was a bold step, and he hesitated long before taking it; but finally he went, and never returned. After travelling and studying for two years on the Continent he went back to London, and was soon joined by his family. Then began a career of uninterrupted success. It was his own opinion, shared by later critics, that his best pictures were painted in America. In England, however, he executed several larger and more important works; he was the fashion, and many of the nobility sat to him, including the three princesses, daughters of George III. He took up his- torical painting, following the fashion of the day, - painting the "Death of Chatham," now in the National Gallery, and well known through Barto- lozzi's engraving; "The Siege of Gibraltar," in the Guildhall of London ; and other large pictures.3

1 [His miniature of Governor Bowdoin is en- graved in Mr. Lodge's chapter in Vol. III .- ED.] 2 [See Vol. II. p. xlviii, and N. I. Bowditch's Gleaner Articles .- ED.]

3 [Among them the large painting of “ King

Charles I. demanding in the House of Commons the five impeached members, 1641," which now hangs in the Boston Public Library, having been purchased and presented in 1859. See Edmund Quincy's Life of Josiah Quincy, 522. - ED.]

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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

In 1777 he was chosen an associate, and six years later a member, of the Royal Academy. He died in 1815, and was buried in Croydon Church

THE BOY AND THE SQUIRREL.

near London.1 His son, John Singleton Copley, was later created Baron Lyndhurst, and was thrice Lord Chancellor of England.2

1 [Mr. A. T. Perkins printed privately in of the Artists, 71 ; Cunningham's Lives of the Brit- 1873 A Sketch of the Life, and a List of some of ish Painters, iv; and Dunlap's Arts of Design in the Works, of John Singleton Copley ; and added the United States .- ED]. a Supplement later. See also Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., Jan. 1873; an illustrated paper on Copley by his grand-daughter, M. B. Amory, in Scribner's Monthly, March, 1881, p. 759; Tuckerman's Book 1

2 [The future Lord Lyndhurst was born in Boston in 1772, and died in England in 1863. His sister, Mrs. Gardiner Greene, died in Boston in 1866, aged ninety-five. - ED.]

389

THE FINE ARTS IN BOSTON.

Another young American, who was to be our best portrait painter, had gone to England two years before Copley left Boston, - Gilbert Stuart. Born in Rhode Island in 1755, he began to paint almost in his cradle; and by the time he was thirteen had taught himself so much that he had orders for portraits. An artist named Cosmo Alexander, here on a visit, was so struck with the boy's talent that he took him back to England in 1772, promising to put him in the way of learning his art; but he died almost as soon as he reached home, and Stuart was left alone. After a two years' struggle to support himself and get an education at Glasgow University, he returned to America. For a year he painted, not without success. But the times were stormy; the colonists had other things to think of besides art; and Stuart, conscious of his deficiencies, and determined to conquer them, sailed again for Europe in the last vessel that left Boston harbor before the blockade, in 1775.

Reaching London, without any introduction he called upon West, who must have seen great promise in his attempts; for Stuart became his pupil at once, and was soon after living in his family, working hard, attending Reynolds's lectures, and studying anatomy. Before long he was assisting West in his pictures; and by 1785 had left his master, and set up for himself; and with immediate success, -no one but Reynolds and Gains- borough getting as large prices for their pictures as he. His house was the resort of clever men of all ranks and parties, half-a-dozen guests finding places every day at his hospitable table. All through his life Stuart's love of good company was next to his love of art, and sometimes interfered with the devotion which art demands of her followers. In 1786 he married ; and then made a trip to Ireland, where he had the same social and professional success. But in 1792 he grew homesick, suddenly abandoned friends and engagements, and sailed for New York. After painting there for two years with much success, he moved to Philadelphia; thence to Washington ; and finally came to Boston, which was his home for more than twenty years, until his death, July 27, 1828.1

Here he gained the same popularity as an artist and as a genial com- panion which he had met everywhere. Charmed by his powers of conver- sation, yielding to his wonderful faculty of entering into the train of others' thoughts, each sitter wore his own characteristic expression while in Stuart's chair; and the finished portrait often revealed habits of thought and feeling known only to intimate friends. No artist ever surpassed, perhaps none ever equalled, him in this faculty. "He seemed," in the words of Allston, " to dive into the thoughts of men ; for they were made to rise and speak on the surface." Even in his more careless works this quality is hardly ever absent. Like Copley, Stuart painted the best people of his day; but his

1 [Stuart was buried in the burying-ground on the Common, but the precise spot is not known. He lived and had his painting-room in Wash-

Street, near Edinboro' Street. Drake's Land- marks, p. 407. During the war of 1812 he lived in the Bartlett House in Roxbury. Drake's ington Place, Fort Hill, and later on Essex

Town of Roxbury, 305 .- ED.]

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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

portraits are so much more individual, each man's idiosyncrasies are so brought out, that the last generation lives for us with a vitality unapproached by the earlier artist.1

As a colorist Stuart stands very high, if judged by the best of his work. This was very unequal; and he painted some pictures which were hard and even absolutely bad in color. His best were superb, - the flesh

GILBERT STUART.2

brilliant and transparent in the lights, mellow and still fleshlike in the shadows. The balance of light and shade is excellent, avoiding the danger-

1 [There is an enumeration of these portraits in George C. Mason's Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart, 1879. The present History contains en- gravings of the following: Nathan Appleton, Washington Allston, John Adams, Nathaniel Bowditch, Joseph S. Buckminster, Sir Isaac Cof- fin, Bishop Cheverus, Samuel Eliot, James Free- man, John Sylvester John Gardiner, Commodore Hull, General Knox, Dr. Kirkland, John Low- ell, Harrison Gray Otis, Paul Revere, President Quincy, Josiah Quincy (d. 1775), Joseph Story, Washington (two), and Daniel Webster. See also Tuckerman's Book of the Artists, p. 107; a

Paper on the "Youth of Stuart" in Scribner's Monthly, March, 1877; and John Neal's remi- niscences in Atlantic Monthly, December, 1868. - ED.]

2 [This same likeness was engraved in an early number of the Knickerbocker Magazine, and is photographed in the Catalogue of the Art Mu- seum Exhibition of Portraits painted by Stuart, held in 1880. The original picture was painted by John Neagle in 1825, and is the property of the Boston Athenæum. A pen and ink sketch of himself by Stuart is owned by Miss I. J. Fal- coner, of Brooklyn, N.Y. - ED.]

391

THE FINE ARTS IN BOSTON.

ous extremes which he himself pointed out in the words: "Where there is too much light there will be no flesh in the shadows; where too little, not enough flesh in the lights." As compositions, his works are of little value. Caring for nothing but the face and head, and for them as the handwriting of the mind, he slighted all the rest, -"copying the works of God, and leaving clothes to the tailors and mantua-makers." One of his maxims runs thus : "Keep your tints as separate as you can; no blending; it is destruc- tive to clear and beautiful effect : it takes off transparency and brightness of color, and renders flesh of the consistency of buckskin." He did not always observe his own rule; but when he did, his heads are marvellous ex- amples of handling. The flesh glows. At a proper distance the tints melt into each other with a pure richness which has never been surpassed in flesh-painting. Looked at more closely, they are models for an artist in knowledge and certainty of aim and the production of effects by the fewest touches and simplest means.

Stuart said that the most signal mistake of his life was the declining an offer made him in 1792 to go to Nova Scotia to paint the portrait of the Duke of Kent, who offered to send a ship of war for him; but he had come to America with the fixed purpose of painting Washington, at any sacrifice, and the offer was refused. From a pecuniary point of view this may have been a mistake; for Stuart's fame it was a wise decision; for America and for the world it was a fortunate one. He had shown in Europe a fondness for convivial society which interfered with his art. He would probably have yielded again to its temptations, returned to England, resumed his old life, and left behind him at his death the portraits of many lords and ladies; and the world would have lacked those works of his brush in which succeeding generations behold the Father of his Country. Stuart's portraits of Wash- ington are numerous, - most of them reproductions of the head belonging to the Boston Athenaeum. This and the companion head of Mrs. Washing- ton were painted to hang at Mount Vernon. The artist preferred it to any he had made, and retained it until his death, having obtained the General's consent to accept repetitions of the pictures in place of the originals.

Although this has thus come to be the typical likeness of Washington, it is a question whether it is the best one Stuart ever made. His own pre- ference may have sprung from a sense of difficulties overcome; for when Washington sat for it, he had just had inserted a set of false teeth, which as he soon after wrote to his dentist gave the lips, both above and below, a pouting and swelling appearance. This defect is much less shown in the portrait painted for Colonel Gibbs. Less mellow in color than the Athe- næum head, this has more fire and character. Both pictures show how Stu- art dived beneath the surface and saw the mind in the visage. Judgment and self-control, resolution and an iron will, a strong temper held firmly in check, benevolence, sagacity, - all that we so rightly worship in Washing- ton can be recognized by an attentive seeker in these portraits. Fortunate indeed was it that such a painter lived in the time of such a man; and that

392

THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

he clung to the determination which had brought him back to his native land, and left to it such images of its greatest and purest patriot ! 1

In 1826, two years before Stuart's death, the first attempt was made at an Art Gallery in our city, when the Boston Athenæum threw open to artists a room containing a collection of casts from the antique, the gift of Augustus Thorndike, and one or two portraits of benefactors of the Athenæum. The next year the first regular exhibition of painting and sculpture was opened to the public. From that time an exhibition was held every year; and, although the number of works collected was small at first, the movement was an important one, keeping alive and fostering a love of art. As works of art became more common in private houses, their owners lent them to these exhibitions where they could be seen and studied; while from the sale of tickets and- by private donations a considerable collection was formed as years rolled on, and this was for a long time the only gallery of the kind in Boston. In 1831 the two Washington heads by Stuart were added, through the liberality of the Washington Monument Association and some private persons. Crawford's Orpheus was purchased, mainly by subscription, in 1844. The Athenæum had neither sufficient funds nor enough space appli- cable to the purposes of art; and when the Art Museum was opened in 1876, the principal works were transferred to the new building as a loan, and will probably remain there, as they are seen to much more advantage, while the Athenæum needs all its space for library usc.2

It is not the purpose of this chapter to give the lives of the artists of Bos- ton, nor even a list of them; only to speak of those whose works and lives have influenced the progress of art among us.3 As far as we have gone, por- trait painting was the only branch of art cultivated with any zeal or success. We come now to one who was an artist in the highest and fullest sense of the word, whose whole life was art, -Washington Allston. Coleridge called him " the first genius produced by the Western world," - and his influence on all who came near him, and that which his works still exert, is such as only genius is capable of. Copley and Stuart are remembered as good painters, and noth- ing more. A halo of poetic memories surrounds Allston's life and lingers about his pictures. "The power of infusing one's own life into that which is feigned appears to be the sole prerogative of genius," - these are his own words : they are the key to the distinctive character and charm of his works. Joined to a richness of color worthy of Titian or Paul Veronese are a pure

1 [See an engraving of the Athenaeum head and the note to it, in Mr. H. C. Lodge's chapter in Vol. III. The larger picture, called " Wash- ington at Dorchester Heights," is given in Dr. Hale's chapter in the same volume. - ED.]

2 [See Quincy's History of the Boston Athe- næum, passim. In 1823 the Athenaum bestowed a life-membership on Gilbert Stuart, "as a testi- mony of respect for his eminent talents."- ED.] 8 [The chief general works covering in some sort Boston's share in the development of Amer-

ican Art are William Dunlap's Arts of Design in the United States, and H. T. Tuckerman's Book of the Artists. Mrs. Jameson not inaptly de- scribes Dunlap's book as "gossiping, tedious, and conceited;" yet time is increasing its value. There is a paper by Horatio Greenough on "The Beginning of American Art," written in 1843, and printed in The Crayon, ii. 178. Mr. S. S. Conant supplied the paper, "Progress of the Fine Arts," in the First Century of the Republic, New York, 1876 .- ED.]

393

THE FINE ARTS IN BOSTON.

sweetness, a repose, a breath of poetry, the outcome of his spirit and life, -an absence of all strife for effect or appeal to any but the best part of a love

Wa. allston. 1

for the beautiful, a simplicity and unconscious grace, recalling what those who knew him have said and written of his person and character. The

1 [This cut follows a sketch by Stuart, owned by Miss Ellen T. Parkman, whose permission has been kindly given to have it copied. Tuckerman records a likeness in youth, painted by Allston himself ; a bust by Clevenger from life; one by Brackett, after death; a head by Paul Duggan, for the American Art Union Medal; a statuette by Thomas Ball; and Leslie's portrait in the New York Academy of Design. (Book of the Artists, 148.) Harding painted two portraits : . VOL. IV. - 50.

one is in the Providence Athenaeum, the other in the possession of Mrs. James, Cambridge, Mass. The profile in the Outlines, after a cameo by King, is admirable. Allston's Lectures on Art were published in 1850, edited by his nephew, Richard H. Dana, Jr. ; another nephew, Edmund T. Dana, furnished the account in the Encyclopæ- dia Americana ; and it is understood that his papers passed into the possession of his brother- in-law, the late Richard H. Dana. Besides Tuck-

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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

poetry of his nature was only faintly shown in his published verses, mostly the immature work of youth. Occasionally, in after years, placing his latest work on the easel of his studio, he recited to a visitor in a sweet undertone lines which had taken shape in his mind as he painted; and these, gathering . depth and color from the place and the moment, seemed better than when judged in the full glare of literary criticism. But he never wrote such poetry as he painted.

Born in South Carolina, in 1779, Allston was educated at Newport and Harvard College (1800), and sailed for England in 1801. After two years spent in diligent drawing, and in the best literary and artistic society, he visited France; and at the Louvre, then rich with the spoils of Napoleon's campaigns, he rejoiced in what he called the "gorgeous concert of colors, . . . the poetry of color, procreative in its nature, giving birth to a thousand things which the eye cannot see." Thence through Switzerland he came to Italy ; and in 1805 reached Rome, where he spent four happy years, - living on terms of friendship with Coleridge, Turner, Fenimore Cooper, and Irv- ing. To Coleridge, Allston declared he owed more intellectually than to any- body else. While in Rome he studied anatomy and modelled in clay, - a process which he declared many years after taught him to draw the human knee; a thing he could never do before, and never afterward found diffi- cult. The color of the old masters, especially the Venetians, was the object of deep study with him, - and with profit; for twenty years later the Ro- man artists, though they had forgotten his name, asked after him whom they called the American Titian. The years 1809-10 he spent in Boston. He married Miss Ann Channing, to whom he had been long engaged, and opened a studio in Court Street, between Brattle Street and Cornhill, on the same spot where Smybert had painted eighty years before. He executed several portraits at high prices, and returned to England with his wife in the next year. Leslie, the artist, and Morse, famous as the inventor of the electric telegraph, but then a painter, became his pupils and life-long friends. While Wordsworth, Sir George Beaumont, Collins, Haydon, and other men of distinction eagerly sought his society, he labored so unremittingly at his art that his health gave way, and he fell alarmingly ill. His friends nursed him tenderly, until returning health enabled him to finish and send to the British Institution his picture of "The Dead man Revived by the Touch of Elisha's Bones." It was rewarded with the first prize, of two hundred guineas, and pronounced by West to be worthy of the fifteenth (sixteenth?) century. It was afterward purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

erman and Dunlap, there are other expositors of his life and works, - like William Ware's Works and Genius of Allston ; Charles Sumner's paper in the Boston Book, 1850; Sara Clarke's "Our First Great Painter" in Atlantic Monthly, Feb- ruary, 1865; Mrs. Jameson's account in her Me- moirs ; Margaret Fuller in her Literature and Art, ii; C. Lester's Artists of America ; M. F. Sweetser's convenient little compend, Allston,

1879; Irving's recollections in Duyckinck's Cy- clopædia of American Literature ; also in Irving's Spanish Papers, ii. 143; glimpses in J. R. Lowell's "Cambridge thirty years ago" in his Fireside Travels, and in Leslie's Autobiography ; and a portraiture in the Art Novel, Ernst Carroll. Dr. O. W. Holmes contributed a paper on the Allston exhibition of 1840 to the North Ameri- can Review, vol. 1 .- ED.]

395

THE FINE ARTS IN BOSTON.

Soon after this he was driven nearly frantic with grief at the loss of his wife; but recovering the tone of his mind under the kind care of Morse and Leslie, he visited Paris in 1817; and later in the year painted his "Uriel in the Sun," which took the prize in the British Institution, and was bought by the Marquis of Stafford. "Jacob's Dream," purchased by Lord Egremont, dates from this year, as well as the first sketch of " Bel- shazzar's Feast."

He returned to America in 1818, in spite of the strong advice of Irving, who declared that had he remained in England for a few years longer, sur- rounded by everything to encourage and stimulate him, he would have been at the head of his art. Allston himself wrote: "Something like encourage- ment seems to appear in our horizon. If we have any talents we owe some- thing to our own country when she is disposed to foster them." Landing in Boston, in October, he at once opened a studio in a barn on the Prince Estate, near the corner of Pearl and High streets, where he remained several years. He was chosen an associate of the Royal Academy, London, soon after his return. He had brought home with him his picture of Elijah; and it was purchased from his studio by the Honorable Mr. Labouchere, M. P., afterward Lord Taunton, and carried to England; whence it was brought back in 1870 by Mrs. Samuel Hooper, and presented to our Museum of Fine Arts. In 1827 he sent to the Athenæum Exhibition several pictures which attracted much, notice. In 1830 he was married for the second time, to a sister of Richard Henry Dana, - the union proving a most happy one ; and the next year he built himself a studio in Cambridgeport,1 which was to be his home for the rest of his life. He had brought from England the large canvas of his "Belshazzar," thinking that six months' more work would finish it. Several liberal Bostonians purchased it for $10,000, advancing part of the price. The picture was set up in his studio; and Stuart, now an old man, was called upon for advice and criticism, which he gave unspar- ingly and honestly. Allston recognized the justice of the strictures, and undertook a radical change in the perspective, which involved immense labor, and was unfinished at his death. For twenty-five years the great work stood in his studio, carefully hidden from all visitors, but ever present to the mind's eye of the artist. Though he from time to time painted pictures of a size and of subjects better suited to his taste and the quality of his genius, the " Belshazzar " was never out of his thoughts; or if he forgot it for a while, the indiscreet surmises of the public, and the more legitimate inquiries of the owners of the picture left his mind no rest. His modesty took alarm at the glowing anticipations which occasionally appeared in the newspapers. He knew that his friends had formed high expecta- tions from his genius, and feared to fall below them. The subject grew hateful to him. The mechanical labor was too great for his feeble frame ; yet, shrinking nervously from showing the picture to any one in its incom-

1 [His house stood on the corner of Magazine and Auburn streets, and his studio was nearly opposite. Drake's Landmarks of Middlesex, p. 193. - ED.]

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THE MEMORIAL HISTORY OF BOSTON.

plete state, he called in no assistance in laying on ground tints and other work which might have been done by a house-painter. Again and again the work was put aside in discouragement, and resumed as a duty; and this went on for twenty years and more, - the mental distress and physical labor gradually wearing him out,- until, after a hard day's work on the unending task, he complained of a slight oppression in the evening, and sinking down in his chair fell asleep, on July 9, 1843.

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The memorial history of Boston : including Suffolk County, Massachusetts. 1630-1880, Vol. IV, Part 50

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897, ed; Jewett, C. F. (Clarence F.), publisher Publication date: 1881 Publisher: Boston : Osgood Number of Pages: 760

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897, ed; Jewett, C. F. (Clarence F.), publisher
Publication date: 1881
Publisher: Boston : Osgood
Number of Pages: 760