Day 364 - Copley and commode

June 29, 2024

I have the devil of a time finding gallery 717.  The museum map isn't helpful because it doesn't indicate that  the gallery, along with a number of others, is on a different level from other American Wing galleries, accessible by an elevator that labels this level as "Period rooms - handicapped access only." (It turns out that there's also a back stairway to reach these galleries, but who would know?)  A museum guard on the third floor directs me to the second floor, while a guard there directs me to the third floor before realizing that my destination is a floor in between. 

When I at last locate the gallery, I'm forced to reckon once again with the somewhat absurd, or at least tome-dependent, nature of my project.  The gallery has been reopened relatively recently, and I find that works that I know I've seen elsewhere - Houdon's bust of Benjamin Franklin, Copley's oil sketch of his "Watson and the Shark" painting -have now been moved here. I should try to wrap the project up before yet another major overhaul of the museum's collections is completed!

The gallery is now home to a number of pieces of furniture and portraits from the mid-18th century. With the new arrangement comes new signage and new item descriptions, and I feel more than a bit clobbered by all the references to the existence of slavery in early American history.  The introductory placard notes that by mid-century, decorative arts and portraiture were firmly established among well-to-do colonialists. It adds that after the American Revolution, native-born artists who had trained in England often returned to the United States to paint "celebratory images that expressed the pride of a new republic, " but that some  works "suggest how the exclusion of women, Indigenous [note the capital I!]  peoples, and enslaved individuals from the nation's conception of civil society contradicted its founding principles of equality and liberty."  

The problem is, I don't know what this means. That we don't see images of Native Americans and Black people? This is hardly surprising, since portraiture served as a marker of wealth and status, from which Native Americans and Blacks, as well as most whites, were excluded. And what is "civil society?" The right to vote? Equality in the legal system? We don't find these in the new American republic, it's true - but we don't find them anywhere else in the world at that time, either. And the placard doesn't acknowledge that slavery existed in Europe as well as the United States, although in other countries it was probably not a linchpin of society and the economy as it was here. In any event, I look over my shoulder to see a portrait of a woman prominently displayed. True, it was painted on the occasion of her marriage, (as was the accompanying portrait of her husband-to-be), but women were hardly excluded from the arts and society, if not "civil society."

A placard describing an armchair from Charleston notes that the city was a major center of trade and a busy slave market, and says that the chair was "likely" made in part and cared for by enslaved people. Maybe so as to its manufacture, almost certainly so as to its care, but do we need constant reminders of slavery? Or, for that matter, that the colonialists' preference for mahogany had disastrous ecological effects on the Caribbean island from which the trees were taken? Who knew, at that time?

I'm tempted to ask a museum guard, who appears to be a person of color, what he thinks of all this, but I don't; when I get closer, I think he may be South Asian, anyway.

A lot of the furniture in this room strikes me as dark (that mahogany), heavy, imposing, and not to my taste. But I very much like a marble-topped commode, perhaps 42 inches wide and 30 inches high, that was made in Newport around 1755-1765.  The white marble brightens the dark mahogany wood and really makes the piece stand out. Should my pleasure in the commode be diminished by knowing, as the placard informs me, that its owners, Robert and Anne Crooke, "members of Newport's mercantile elite... built their fortunes on the transatlantic trade of enslaved people, sugar, and timber"? Sorry, but I would still be happy to own this piece.  

I'm also taken with a John Singleton Copley portrait of Joseph Sherburne, a Boston merchant. Executed around 1767-1770 and measuring about 54 inches high and 48 inches wide, it depicts Sherburne, seated against a background of dark blue drapery and wearing what appears to be a silky brown dressing gown. The darkness of the image is relieved by the subject's face and hands, the red vest he wears under the gown, the ruffled white cuffs of his shirt, and his white cravat.  What's especially notable is that Sherburne doesn't appear to have been a handsome man, and Copley didn't try to glamorize him.  He does, however, make Sherburne look intelligent and powerful, worthy of a prominent place in Boston society.