A Military Officer
1756
Painter, British, active 1752/1777
Artwork overview
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Medium
oil on canvas
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Credit Line
-
Dimensions
overall: 77.5 x 63.6 cm (30 1/2 x 25 1/16 in.)
framed: 93.7 x 79.7 x 6 cm (36 7/8 x 31 3/8 x 2 3/8 in.) -
Accession
1947.17.25
Artwork history & notes
Provenance
(André E. Rueff, Brooklyn, N.Y.); sold 5 January 1924 through (Art House, Inc., New York) to Thomas B. Clarke [1848-1931], New York;[1] his estate; sold as part of the Clarke collection 29 January 1936, through (M. Knoedler & Co., New York), to The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh; gift 1947 to NGA.
[1] Letter from André Rueff, 5 January 1924, to C. J. Dearden, President of Art House (Clarke files, in NGA curatorial files). The name of the seller and the date of purchase are also recorded in a copy of Portraits by Early American Artists of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Collected by Thomas B. Clarke (Philadelphia, 1928) annotated with information from files of M. Knoedler & Co., NY (copy in NGA curatorial records and in NGA library). According to the provenance provided by Rueff, which lacks documentation, the portrait was given by the sitter to a Colonel Thayer of the British army and later descended in the Adair family, including Esther Latham Adair, Alice Adair, James Adair (d. 1914), and his brother William of Jersey City, from whom Rueff acquired it. Confirmation of this provenance has not been possible. Lawrence Park, Joseph Blackburn, A Colonial Portrait Painter, with a Descriptive List of his Works, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1923: 6, noted that the portrait had come "to light about two years ago." John Hill Morgan and Henry Wilder Foote, An Extension of Lawrence Park's Descriptive List of the Work of Joseph Blackburn, Worcester, MA, 1937: 48, wrote that William Adair, of 34 Grant Avenue, Jersey City, said that he was a descendant of an Adair family of Boston, from whom he inherited the portrait. The only part of the story that can be documented is that William Adair lived at the Grant Avenue address; see R. L. Polk and Co.'s Jersey City Directory, 1925-1926.
Associated Names
Exhibition History
1924
Exhibition of the Earliest Known Portraits of Americans by Painters of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, The Union League Club, New York, March 1924, no. 21, as General Joshua Winslow.
1928
Portraits by Early American Artists of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Collected by Thomas B. Clarke, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1928-1931, unnumbered and unpaginated catalogue, as General Joshua Winslow.
1989
Extended loan for use by Ambassador Maynard Glitman, U.S. Embassy residence, Brussels, Belgium, 1989-1991.
Bibliography
1923
Park, Lawrence. Joseph Blackburn, A Colonial Portrait Painter, with a Descriptive List of his Works Worcester, Massachusetts, 1923: 61.
1924
Exhibition of the Earliest Known Portraits of Americans by Painters of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Exh. cat. The Union League Club, New York, 1924: no. 21, as General Joshua Winslow.
1928
Portraits by Early American Artists of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Collected by Thomas B. Clarke. Exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1928, unnumbered, as General Joshua Winslow.
1929
Bayley, Frank W. Five Colonial Artists of New England. Boston, 1929: 135 repro., as General John Winslow.
1930
Bolton, Theodore and Harry Lorin Binsse. "An American Artist of Formula: Joseph Blackburn." The Antiquarian 15 (November 1930): 92, as General Joshua Winslow.
1937
Morgan, John Hill and Henry Wilder Foote. An Extension of Lawrence Park's Descriptive List of the Work of Joseph Blackburn. Worcester, Massachusetts, 1937: 47-49, no. 126, as Lieutenant Joshua Winslow II.
1945
Baker, C. H. Collins. "Notes on Joseph Blackburn and Nathaniel Dance." Huntington Library Quarterly 9, no. 1 (November 1945): 41.
1970
American Paintings and Sculpture: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1970: 16, repro.
1980
American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1980: 28, repro.
1981
Williams, William James. A Heritage of American Paintings from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1981: 18, 21, repro. 19.
1995
Miles, Ellen G. American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1995: 11-13, color repro. 12.
Inscriptions
lower left on painted spandrel: I Blackburn Pinxt 1756.
Wikidata ID
Q20178148