Mather Brown (1761-1831), 1812

| self-portrait
| oil on canvas
| 30 1/4 x 25 1/4 (76.80 x 64.14)
| inscribed in composition, l.l.: ‘My Dear Aunts/Neither time nor/distance [has]/diminished [my] affection.’
| Gift of Josephine Spencer Gay, 1923
| Weis 16

Ex. Coll.: Sitter; gift to his aunts Catherine and Mary Byles, 1822; passed solely to Catherine, 1832; upon her death in 1837, willed to the Reverend Mather Byles DesBrisay; sold at ‘Hon. M. B. DesBrisay Collection Sale,’ C. F. Libbie & Co., April 4, 1908, to Frederick L. Gay (1856-1916); to his wife, the donor.

Exhibitions:
1922, ‘Early American Paintings,’ The Copley Society, Boston.
1977, ‘Wellsprings of a Nation,’ Worcester Art Museum, no. 257.

Publications:
F. W. Coburn, ‘Mather Brown,’ Art in America 11 (August 1923): 254.
Franklin P. Cole, Mather Books and Portraits through Six Generations (Portland, Maine: Casco Printing, 1978), 204.
Dresser, 1969, 724.
William Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, 2 vols. (New York: George P. Scott & Co., 1834), 1: 270.
Dorinda Evans, Mather Brown: Early American Artist in England (Middletown, CT.: Wesleyan University Press, 1982), no. 162.
Cuthbert Lee, Early American Portrait Painting (New Haven: YUP, 1929), 290.
Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 47 (Boston: 1914): 289.
Frederic F. Sherman, Early American Painting (NY: Century Co., 1932), 139.

 

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