Picturing the Worthies:
An Introduction to The Brown Portrait Collection
Jay Saunders Redding
(1906–1988)
For almost two centuries Brown has acquired portraits of men and women whose lives, in one way or another, have had meaning for the University. The subjects of these portraits have included administrators and faculty. Some have been trustees or benefactors. Many have been Brown graduates, though some have been community leaders or other figures worthy of emulation who have only tangential connection to the school. These likenesses date from every period in Brown's history, from its founding years to the present time, and, taken as a whole, they can be viewed as a reflection of the University's concerns and priorities at any given time
No formal policy dictates whose likeness is represented in the Brown portrait collection. Instead, the University seems to have been inspired by individual initiatives to commission or accept donations of new paintings of Brown worthies. The reasoning behind these choices may not always seem clear to us in retrospect. Early on, the University commissioned a portrait of Esek Hopkins, the first commodore of the American navy, but not of his brother Stephen, Brown's first chancellor, ten-time governor of Rhode Island, and a signer of the Declaration of Independence. We have no portrait of James Maxcy, second president of the University, but we do have Catherine of Braganza and Charles II of England, under whose reign in 1663 Rhode Island received its colonial charter. Included in the collection are two lithographs of Andrew Carnegie, donated by his foundation along with the funds to support our libraries, and subsequently mistakenly catalogued and published as original paintings. The common theme seems to be that the people portrayed in these images in some way lived lives that benefited Brown, and consequently were meant to serve as an inspiration to the University community.
Not surprisingly, the subjects of these portraits are overwhelmingly male. Throughout much of its history Brown has been governed, supported, taught, led, inspired, and populated by men. The masculine likenesses that line the walls of the campus buildings simply reflect this historical truth. Today images of women account for fewer than one in ten portraits at Brown. Their numbers include prominent scholars, deans of Pembroke College, wives of benefactors, a queen consort who died almost sixty years before the college was founded, an early advocate of women's education in Providence, and the interim president of the University in 2000-2001.
Brown acquired its first portrait in 1815, a painting of its founding president James Manning. Received through a bequest of his widow, Margaret Stites Manning, it was one of the pair of paintings the couple had made by the Scottish portraitist Cosmo Alexander when they moved to Providence in 1770. After Mrs. Manning's death it was hung in the College Edifice, now called University Hall, as a remembrance of the man who, more than anyone else, was instrumental in founding this institution and who championed building a home for it in Providence. The other of the pair Mrs. Manning willed to her niece. Another seventy-seven years would pass before her heirs bequeathed Margaret Manning's own likeness to Brown and the pair of portraits was reunited.
The second portrait to come to Brown was commissioned in 1835 by the members of the Corporation to honor the University's great benefactor and namesake Nicholas Brown, Jr., who, at the age of sixty-six, was by then contemplating his mortality and preparing to put his worldly affairs in order. It was painted in the following year by Chester Harding, a prominent Boston artist equal to the task of portraying such a distinguished subject.
In 1840 the Providence mercantile firm of Brown & Ives underwrote the cost of hiring the Rhode Island artist James Sullivan Lincoln to paint a copy of the University's original portrait of President Manning, presumably to be installed in Manning Hall, the new library and chapel building. Then, in 1846, the University acquired its fourth and fifth portraits when John Carter Brown commissioned G. P. A. Healy to paint President Francis Wayland; and the First Baptist church presented another Healy portrait of the Brown graduate and Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson, "to be placed in a conspicuous place of some of the halls of the College."
Thus the idea evolved that Brown should collect and display portraits of worthy figures in the history of the University. In the mid-1850s John Russell Bartlett, Secretary of State for the state of Rhode Island and library advisor to John Carter Brown, spearheaded a campaign to acquire the likenesses of war heroes, titans of industry, and benefactors to the University. Many of these portraits were copies, newly painted from originals still owned by the families of the subjects. For some of this work Bartlett employed the young Martin Johnson Heade, who, struggling to establish himself, supported himself by creating large framed versions of portrait miniatures. In 1857 Bartlett wrote to the Secretary of the Corporation of Brown University:
Sir: I am directed by the gentlemen at whose expense the portraits of the distinguished men of Rhode Island have been presented, to place them at the disposal of the Corporation of the University, with the desire that they may be arranged in some suitable hall where at all times they may be accessible.
Rhode Island Hall, ca. 1868. Before the construction of Sayles Memorial Hall in 1881 Brown University portraits were exhibited in this building. In this photograph the 1838 portrait of Nicholas Brown, Jr. can be seen at the end of the galleries of the Jencks Museum on the second floor of Rhode Island Hall.
As several of the members of the Corporation were the very gentlemen who subscribed to Bartlett's appeal for funds to acquire these paintings, the portraits were promptly installed in Rhode Island Hall. In 1867 Reuben Guild, the University Librarian, first described these accumulated pictures as a "collection," and articulated just what, collectively, they had come to signify to Brown:
The collection of portraits in Rhode Island Hall now comprises thirty-one, many of them painted from life. They represent men of all ranks and professions, and include not only benefactors, officers, and graduates of the college, but also soldiers, statesmen, and divines, who have distinguished themselves in the annals of Rhode Island….An enterprise so auspiciously begun, should be continued from year to year, until the Collection shall at least approach more nearly to completion.
Sayles Memorial Hall, 1881. Sayles Hall, the University Chapel, also houses a notable portrait gallery of former Presidents and other officers of the University, as well as of distinguished alumni.
The ideal that the Brown portrait collection might one day be complete was superseded by the reality of an ever-growing body of paintings. In 1875 the New England Historical and Genealogical Register published a list of thirty-six painted likenesses, four portrait busts, and a bronze portrait medallion at Brown. Though a new exhibition room was built onto Rhode Island Hall in 1874, the portrait collection soon outgrew that building. When Sayles Hall was built in 1881, it was glowingly described in the University's literature as housing "a notable portrait gallery of former presidents and other officers of the University, as well as of distinguished alumni." Its walls were paneled only to a height of six feet; above that line was bare plaster to be covered with pictures. Early photographs of the interior show portraits lining every wall, some stacked one atop another in the fashion of the day.
Sayles Memorial Hall, ca. 1881. In the 19th century portraits were hung side by side around the walls of Sayles Hall. Brown’s portrait of Gen. Ambrose Burnside can be seen in what became the organ loft in 1903.
In many respects, Brown University's efforts to collect portraits in the second half of the nineteenth century paralleled a larger trend in some quarters of American society, which was to represent one's family as being well and securely established by displaying ancestral portraits. In the University's case, the retrospective assembling of the images of worthy men seems to have been motivated in part by an attempt to associate the institution with the tangible evidence of a worthy past. In this way the University could point to its colonial origins while at the same time providing an example to youth of lives lived with usefulness and reputation.
Gallery installation, Loan Exhibition of Colonial Relics, 1892. The Cabinet Building, now Mencoff Hall, 68 Waterman Street.
This social use of portraits by the old families of Providence and by Brown University coincided in April of 1892, when the Gaspee Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution held a three-day loan exhibition of almost 1,400 artifacts at the Cabinet Building of the Rhode Island Historical Society at 66 Waterman Street (now Mencoff Hall). From their friends and neighbors, members of the DAR borrowed what they termed "relics of olden times," and displayed them in five jam-packed exhibition galleries. One of these rooms, termed "the Picture Gallery," contained an astonishing collection of sixty-eight framed portraits, nine of them borrowed from the University for this two-day celebration of Yankee heritage. In many cases the exhibition contained the original family portraits from which Brown's copies were made, though in the photographs of that memorable occasion one can find the University's likenesses of Moses Brown, King Charles II and Queen Catherine of Braganza, Esek Hopkins, and Governor William Coddington. Hung high on the walls, far higher than it was possible for anyone to observe their features in detail, these paintings' authoritative presence sets a dignified and stolid tone as they preside over this grand assembly of relics.
With the growth of the Brown campus in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, additional portraits were acquired to adorn the walls of the new classrooms, dormitories, and libraries. Beloved faculty members, soldiers fallen in wartime, benefactors of the new buildings, all were memorialized in the halls of the University. The campus enjoyed more likenesses of women as Pembroke College commissioned portraits of its deans. As grand houses came to the University — Gardner House, Nicholson, Goddard/Iselin, Rochambeau/Sharpe — family portraits of the donors oftentimes came with them.
Oil sketch for the portrait of President Vartan Gregorian, 1998.
Today the catalogue of the Brown portrait collection numbers 310, though not all of these pictures can be found on campus. Some have not been located since the nineteenth century. Ten portraits — a copy by Heade of Oliver Cromwell, for example — were deemed to have incidental significance to the history of the University and were deaccessioned. An enormous portrait of Civil War General Ambrose Burnside, later governor and then US senator from Rhode Island, is now on loan to the Rhode Island statehouse. A portrait of Sarah Doyle, pioneer in women's education, was sliced from its frame and stolen. The records of a portrait of nineteenth-century industrialist Zachariah Allen are marked simply, and inexplicably, "returned to donor."
Making a replacement copy of the Sarah Doyle portrait with the artist, Bryan Konietzko, Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, 1999.
On the other hand, we continue to add to the list of the Brown portrait collection. In recent years Brown has acquired the likenesses of benefactors, presidents, and officers of the University. It has commissioned a conjectural portrait of Stephen Hopkins, its first chancellor, and a replacement portrait of Sarah Doyle. In 1992 President Vartan Gregorian commissioned a portrait of Jay Saunders Redding, a member of the Board of Fellows and the first African-American faculty member at Brown; and in 1999 President Gordon Gee commissioned a portrait of Samuel Nabritt, the first African-American to earn the Ph.D. at Brown.
Sadly, some paintings in the Brown portrait collection have lost their identity over the years. Picturing what were once familiar faces, some portraits are listed now only as "unknown subject." When they were new, the identity of the subject must have seemed too obvious to inscribe on these paintings, and a century later we pore through historical records trying to match faces with names. Nowadays the name of the subject of every new portrait is marked on both the stretcher and the frame, a curatorial practice that at first may seem superfluous but that history has taught us is prudent.
Portrait of Sarah Helen Whitman before restoration, 2000. Note tears in the fabric below subject’s chin and in upper right quadrant.
As the pictures in the Brown portrait collection age, they require regular maintenance. Sometimes the problem is just an accumulation of surface grime — usually airborne dust imbedded in varnish, though tobacco tar and coal dust also obscure the portraits in campus buildings. In fluctuating atmospheric environments a painting's canvas can become slack in its stretcher, sometimes causing the painted surface to flake and fall off. Exposure to the ultraviolet rays of sunlight can cause the protective varnish of older paintings to darken and become opaque. Sometimes Brown's portraits have suffered rough treatment by persons who were untrained in art handling, or at the hands of vandals who meant them harm. Sometimes they have been damaged by well-meaning enthusiasts who have done irreversible harm in misguided attempts to restore them. Inevitably, all of these problems and more beset the Brown portrait collection.
Portrait of Sarah Helen Whitman after restoration, 2000. When the painting was cleaned the artist's signature "Arnold/1869" was revealed at lower left.
In 1997 a team of specialized art conservators was engaged to examine every portrait at Brown, and to note any conditions that would require treatment. Their recommendations form the basis of a multi-year plan to restore the portraits to stable condition and original appearance. Happily, their laboratory findings have sometimes increased our understanding of the portraits at Brown and revealed information obscured over time. For instance, on the pair of portraits of the Baptist missionary couple Josiah Goddard, class of 1835, and Eliza Goddard, the letters both are pictured writing have recently been deciphered as recording the year and place in which the pictures were painted. Artists' signatures have been revealed and original features have been discovered obscured beneath layers of later overpainting. In this way original information, long thought to be lost, has been recovered through painstaking and systematic laboratory investigation.
Reinstalling portrait of William Francis Sayles after renovations to Sayles Hall, 2001.
While many portraits at Brown are handsome in appearance or are the work of distinguished artists, not all are aesthetic triumphs. Some show subjects who do not meet modern standards of beauty, and some are painted in styles now out of favor. Some have been altered to unpleasing appearance, and some are just plainly the work of bad artists. But, while they may be greater or lesser works of art, these portraits all represent some aspect of the culture of Brown University. We regard each one of them as vignettes in the history of this institution, and we mean to dignify them all without prejudice.
The catalogue that follows represents an ongoing effort to make available the information about the Brown portrait collection. Additions or corrections are welcome and should be brought to the attention of the University Curator.
Robert P. Emlen
University Curator
August, 2003