Channing, William Ellery (1780-1842)
Role: Providence, RI, MinisterDates:
Portrait Location: John Hay Library 300
Artist: Pratt, Henry Cheever (1803-1880)
Portrait Date: 1857
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 51 1/8 x 41 3/8 in. (129.86 x 105.09 cm.)
Framed Dimensions: 63 x 53 in. (160.02 x 134.62 cm.)
Brown Portrait Number: 17
Brown Historical Property Number: 1311
William Channing received all his collegiate and theological training at Harvard. He then moved to Providence where became a highly regarded rector of St. Johns Church. He went on to found the Unitarian Church in Providence. He was considered an eminent leader in religious and ethical thought and he wrote extensively on the cause of liberty for slaves. Channing was a fellow of Harvard and the American Academy.
Henry Pratt was a portraitist as well as a landscape and panorama painter. When Pratt was fourteen, S. F. B. Morse noticed a painting he had drawn on the door of a New Hampshire barn and immediately offered him an apprenticeship in his Boston studio. He worked for Morse for years and became a successful artist in his own right. From 1851 to 1853 he traveled with John R. Bartlett's expedition to the Mexican border and made many sketches that he later turned into oils. Pratt's likeness of Channing is a copy from an oil painting by Chester Harding (1792 - 1866) and was commissioned by Bartlett, who presented it to Brown in 1857. Harding, a native of Boston, was one of the 19th-century's premier portraitists.