Images(3)

Dr. Silvester Gardiner (1708-1786)

Dateprobably 1772

Maker John Singleton Copley Born Boston, Massachusetts, 1738; died London, England, 1815

Label TextFamous for his exacting likenesses of noted New Englanders prior to the Revolutionary War, Copley endeared himself to his sitters by painting them as they were. Here, he has captured his friend Dr. Silvester Gardiner, a physician with wealth in pharmaceuticals and real estate. Dr. Gardiner gazes at us with wry bemusement, his elegant suit of clothes, powdered physician’s periwig, and fine furniture all clues to his significant affluence. In early America, portraiture was the domain of a privileged few, begging the question of the unsung individuals who likewise built America.

John Singleton Copley painted in historic times and gave us the faces of some of the most famous names in American history. Because of Copley's lifelike depictions, we can envision Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and so many others of the men and women who populated revolutionary Boston as living human beings full of character, personality, and thought. In a period when portrait painting was largely formulaic, how did Copley, a self-taught artist, meet the challenge of creating not just fashionable or heroic types but studies of individuals who still seem so completely natural to us, despite their eighteenth-century dress and odd-looking, elaborate wigs? The portrait of Silvester Gardiner, painted by Copley around 1772, has much to tell us about the life and times of the painter who documented so thoroughly the men and women shaped by America's revolution and who preserved their individual spirits so vividly on canvas.

Object number2006.125

ProvenanceCommissioned by sitter, probably in 1772; during the American Revolution, reappropriated by the Committee of Sequestration to his daughter, Abigail Whipple, 1778; by descent through the Gardiner family, Gardiner, Maine; [Coe Kerr Gallery, New York], prior to May 1994; Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington, 2006

Photo CreditPhoto: Susan Cole

A portrait painter must understand Mankind, and enter into their characters, and express their minds as well as their faces.

Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1715)

Exhibition HistoryChicago, Illinois, Art Institute of Chicago, From Colony to Nation: An Exhibition of American Painting, Silver and Architecture from 1650 to the War of 1812, Apr. 21 - June 19, 1949. Cat. no. 37, p. 31 (lent by Mr. Robrt Hallowell Gardiner, Gardiner, Maine). Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, John Singleton Copley in America, June 7 - Aug. 27, 1995 (New York, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sept. 26, 1995 - June 7, 1996; Houston, Texas, Museum of Fine Arts, Feb. 4 - Apr. 28, 1996; Millwaukee, Wisconsin, Milwaukee Art Museum, May 22 - Aug. 25, 1996). Text by Carrie Rebora et al. Cat. no. 75, pp. 309-12, reproduced p. 311. Seattle, Washington, Seattle Art Museum, American Art: The Stories We Carry, Oct. 20, 2022 - ongoing.Published ReferencesBartlett, William H. Frontier Missionary. Boston: Ide and Dutton, 1853; reproduced op. p. 290. Tuckerman, Henry. Book of the Artists: American Artist Life (1867). Reprint, New York: James F. Carr, 1967; p. 72. Perkins, Augustus Thorndike. A Sketch of the Life and Some of the Works of John Singleton Copley. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1873; p. 56. Updike, Wilkins. History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett, vol. I. Boston, 1907; p. 134, reproduced. Bayley, Frank W. The Life and Works of John Singleton Copley. Boston: The Taylor Press, 1915; pp. 112-113. Robinson, Caroline. The Gardiners of Narragansett. Providence, Rhode Island, 1919; p. vii, reproduced frontispiece. Spading, James A. "Silvester Gardiner." In Dictionary of American Medical Biography, edited by Howard A. Kelly, M.D. and Walter L. Burrage, A.M., M.D., p. 452. New York and London: D. Appleton and Company, 1928. Jones, E.A. The Loyalists of Massachusetts: Their Memorials, Petitions, and Claims. London: The Saint Catherine Press, 1930; p. 142, reproduced Plate XXI. cf. Bolton, Theodore, and Harry Lorin Binsse. "John Singleton Copley: Probably the Greatest American Portrait Painter, Here for the First Time Appraised As an Artist in Relation to His Contemporaries." Antiquarian 15 (December 1930): p. 116. Fulton, John F. "Silvester Gardiner." In Dictionary of American Biography, edited by Allen Johnson and Dumas Malone, vol. IV, p. 160. (1931); reprint edition New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1960. Parker, Barbara Neville, and Anne Bolling Wheeler. John Singleton Copley: American Portraits in Oil, Pastel, and Miniature, with Biographical Sketches. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1938; pp. 78-79, reproduced pl. 103. Prown, Jules. John Singleton Copley; vol. I, In America, 1738-1774. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1966; pp. 158-159, 215, reproduced fig. 318. Coolidge, Olivia E. Colonial Entrepreneur: Dr. Silvester Gardiner and the Settlement of Maine's Kennebec Valley. Gardiner, Maine: Tilbury House Publishers and Gardiner Library Association, 1999; pp. 73-76, 269, reproduced cover [color] and frontispiece. Milford, T.E. The Gardiners of Massachusetts: Provincial Ambition and the British-American Career. Durham, Massachusetts, University of New Hampshire Press, 2005; pp. 2, 37, reproduced p. 13. Carbone, Teresa A., et al. American Paintings in the Brooklyn Museum. Vol. I: Artists Born by 1876. London: D. Giles Limited, in association with the Brooklyn Museum, 2006; p. 409. Farr, Sheila. "SAM acquires Copley painting." Seattle Times, December 5, 2006. Hackett, Regina. "Copley Comes to SAM." Seattle Post-Intelligencer, December 5, 2006. Ishikawa, Chiyo et al. Seattle Art Museum Downtown. Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum, 2007; p. 32, illus. pp. 39, 56 Seattle Art Museum: Bridging Cultures. London: Scala Publishers Ltd. for the Seattle Art Museum, 2007; pp. 26-27, illus. p. 26 Ishikawa, Chiyo, ed. A Community of Collectors: 75th Anniversary Gifts to the Seattle Art Museum. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 2007; illus. opposite title page Junker, Patricia. "A Sense of Place: American Art at the Seattle Art Museum." The Magazine Antiques (November 2008): p. 113, reproduced fig. 9, p. 114. Tortora, Daniel J. Fort Halifax: Winslow's Historic Outpost. Charleston, S.C.:The History Press, 2014; pp. 45-46, reproduced p. 46. Dorner, Zachary. Merchants of Medicines: The Commerce and Coercion of Health in Britain's Long Eighteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020; p. 125, reproduced fig. 4.3. Tyler, John, ed. The Correspondence of Thomas Hutchinson: Volume 4 November 1770 - June 1772. Boston: The Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2022; p. 255, reproduced.

Credit LineGift of Ann and Tom Barwick, Barney A. Ebsworth, Maggie and Douglas Walker, Virginia and Bagley Wright, and Ann P. Wyckoff; and gift, by exchange, of Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Gerber; Mr. and Mrs. Louis Brechemin; Mrs. Reginald H. Parsons Memorial; Anne Parsons Frame, in memory of Lieutenant Colonel Jasper Ewing Brady, Jr., and Maud B. Parsons; Estate of Louise Raymond Owens; Anonymous donors; and Eugene Fuller Memorial Collection; with additional funds from the American Art Support Fund and the American Art Acquisition Fund, in honor of the 75th Anniversary of the Seattle Art Museum

Dimensions50 x 40 in. (127 x 101.6 cm)

MediumOil on canvas