Goddard, Josiah (1813 - 1854)
Role: Class of 1835, Baptist MissionaryDates:
Portrait Location: Sharpe House 204
Artist: Field, Erastus Salisbury (1805 - 1900)
Portrait Date: 1838
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 28 3/4
Framed Dimensions: 33 1/4
Brown Portrait Number: 146
Brown Historical Property Number: 1196
Josiah Goddard was raised in a ministerial household in Wendell, Massachusetts, where his father served as Baptist minister. He attended Brown, then the only Baptist college in New England. He continued his studies at Newton Theological Institution, graduating in 1838. In that year he married Eliza Ann Abbott (BP 147) and, shortly afterward, the couple departed for missionary work in China. Visible in this portrait of Goddard is the text of a sermon he has drafted that portends his voyage, "Now no one could for a moment contemplate The spirit of Christ without [being] convinced that It was a spirit of love to the whole world." Goddard and his wife had four children while in China and he learned two native dialects. While in Asia he contracted what was apparently tuberculosis. Following his death there in 1854 his wife and children returned home. Both his son, Josiah Ripley, and his grandson attended Brown, his son returning to China to further his father's missionary objectives.
The painter Erastus Salisbury Field was a neighbor of the Goddards in Palmer, Massachusetts, and in 1838 was at the peak of his career as a portraitist. At first a self-taught painter, Field went on to study in New York with Samuel F. B. Morse. Until about 1841 he traveled around New England as an itinerant portraitist. His work has been classified as "folk" art for its flat, stylized forms and focus on clothing details. In 1842, Field moved back to New York and embarked on a new direction in his work. The paintings from this period, for which he is better known, used Biblical, historical, and classical themes, and included "The Embarkation of Ulysses" (1844) and "Historical Monument to the American Republic" (1876).
This portrait and the companion portrait of his wife Eliza Goddard were given to Brown in 1944 by the Goddards' grandchildren.