Among the portraits are images of thirty-one Worcester
residents
in the Society's collections. Several individuals, such as Isaiah
Thomas,
Mary Stiles Newcomb and Lydia Stiles Foster, are represented by
more than
one portrait. Thomas's importance as the leading publisher of the
Revolutionary
era, founder of the American Antiquarian Society, and patriarch of
a large
family offers abundant reasons why he would be the subject of
multiple
portraits in a variety of media. The Stiles, Foster, and Newcomb
families
are notable because they tell another kind of story. This
collection of
a dozen portraits of three generations of the Stiles family of
Templeton
and Worcester are all miniatures by Eliza Goodridge, a family
friend.
Many of these miniatures were on display at the Cantor Gallery
at the
College of the Holy Cross from November 13 to December 21, 2002.
The AAS portraits reveal some of the complex
relationships of
community life. When Isaiah Thomas, the staunch patriot, moved his
business
to Worcester in 1775, William Paine, a Loyalist, had already left
for
medical training in Scotland and would return to the colonies as a
surgeon
in the British Army during the Revolution. Paine and his family
moved
back to Worcester in 1793, and in 1812, old political sentiments
set aside,
this physician would join with Isaiah Thomas as one of the
founding members
of the American Antiquarian Society. Likewise, we learn of the
regional
and even national importance of some of the sitters. For example,
Aaron
Bancroft was the minister of the Second Parish in Worcester from
1786
to 1839, but also served as president of the American Unitarian
Association
from 1825 to 1836.
Since many of the portraits came to AAS together with
manuscript
collections or were commissioned by the Society, we have
extraordinary
information about the circumstances of their production. There are
occasional
first-person accounts of the process of sitting for portraits as
well
as important documents revealing the costs of the paintings and
even their
frames. Newspaper advertisements found in the AAS collection
provide
documentation about itinerant artists who came to Worcester. In an
effort
to obtain commissions for one artist, Isaiah Thomas, Jr., placed
an advertisement
in the September 12, 1804, issue of the Worcester Spy
saying that examples
of Gerrit Schipper's portraits could be seen in his home or
office. Other
early nineteenth-century Worcester residents, such as Edward D.
Bangs
and Isaiah Thomas, traveled to Boston to sit for oil portraits by
artists
established in Boston studios; later in the century, Stephen
Salisbury
II went to New York for sittings with Daniel Huntington.
The research and documentation of the Society's portrait collection were
undertaken by Lauren B. Hewes. The previous catalogue of the portrait
collection had been published by Frederick Weis in the Proceedings of
the
American Antiquarian Society in 1946. Hewes's work was published in
the
Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society as Volume 111, part
1, and
with the addition of twenty-four color plates, as Portraits in the
Collection of the American Antiquarian Society (Worcester:
American
Antiquarian Society, 2004). These two sources illustrate the entire
collection with text and images for each of the portraits. Introductions
by Linda Docherty, professor of art history at Bowdoin College, and Hewes,
who researched the collection, shed further light on the collection as a
whole and an interpretation of institutional collecting. Others who have
taken part in this collaboration include Charles Barlow, Georgia B.
Barnhill, Megan Bocian, Ellen Dunlap, Christine Estabrook, James N. Heald
2nd, John B. Hench, Henry Peach, Katherine St. Germaine, Caroline F.
Sloat, Caroline W. Stoffel, and Therasa Tremblay.
Georgia B. Barnhill and Caroline Sloat
Enter
Portraits!