The Art Behind Blindspot

Like their countrymen back in England, Scotland, and Ireland, Britons and their descendants living in the North American colonies loved portraits. A likeness taken at marriage, or to mark success in trade or in war, marked one’s progress through life. More than that, a portrait left tracks in time, serving as a tangible, enduring emblem of ties across oceans and down the generations in an era when life was precarious.

Theorists of art such as the English painter Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) thought portraits were common things: higher on the ladder of genres than still life or needlework or seashell mosaics, but decidedly lower than true Art. Reynolds (as Jameson says in Blindspot) favored history painting in the grand manner of the old Italian and Flemish masters. Portraits, by contrast, smacked of flattery—and of commerce. They were copies of nature, not insightful “performances”; they required that an artist possess a good hand but not a noble mind. Nonetheless, patrons wanted portraits. Reynolds spent many evenings lecturing the young gentlemen of London’s Royal Academy on the glories of mythology and allegory. But he spent his days taking likenesses of gentlemen and gentlewomen, their bratty children, and even their dogs.

Reynolds stood atop a very large heap of talent; prospective sitters in London had dozens of talented portraitists to choose from. One art critic writing in the early 1780s said that the city was “overrun with painters, as much as with disbanded soldiers, sailors and ministers.”

Not so Boston. New England had more than its fair share of out-of-work soldiers, sailors, and ministers, but artists were notably scarce. The colonies could not boast a single school of art to train the hands of young painters, or a single great collection of pictures to train their eyes. Even reproductions in line engraving or mezzotint—virtually all of them imported, as were paints, canvases, brushes, pencils, and most other manufactured goods—were hard to come by before the Revolution. Nor was a portraitist’s work steady enough to provide a dependable income. Most colonial artists were self-taught jacks of several trades. Charlestown-born Joseph Badger (1708-1765) painted houses, signs, coaches, and coats of arms as well as portraits on canvas.

For all these reasons, British itinerants dominated the colonial portrait trade. Edinburgh-born John Smibert (1688-1751), the painter of Blindspot’s Charlotte Easton, worked in Boston for over a decade before his death. Joseph Blackburn (dates unknown) shuttled between Boston and Newport, returning to England by 1764.

The artistic traffic across the Atlantic went East as well as West. Beginning in the 1760s, ambitious young would-be artists from the colonies journeyed abroad to study and paint and above all, to see. Some stayed for a season or two; others remained for a lifetime. By the late 1770s, Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, John Trumbull, Mather Brown, Matthew Pratt, Gilbert Stuart, and John Singleton Copley constituted something of an “American school” in London.

These last two—Stuart (1755-1828) and Copley (1738-1815) – share a good deal with Blindspot’s main characters, Stewart Jameson and Frances Easton. Like our Stewart Jameson, Gilbert Stuart – the son of a Scottish snuffmaker who emigrated to Rhode Island after the Battle of Culloden – was a bit of a rogue. A noted raconteur, his ready wit was no match for his chronic indebtedness. He was a superb painter, known (again like Jameson) for his ability to portray a sitter’s inner life on canvas. But Stuart had no truck with Reynolds’s high-flown ideas about Art and Genius. He was happy to work with his hands, mastering his craft and painting for money.

Copley, by contrast, was lit by a burning ambition. (Jameson’s letter introducing Fanny to Joshua Reynolds borrows from letters Copley penned in the 1760s, in which he yearned for England and for fame in roughly equal measure.) By the early 1760s, the self-taught Copley – the son of a tobacconist – had become the leading portraitist in his native Boston. But like Blindspot’s Weston, he fancied a bigger pond. His rise to international fame began in 1765, when he sent his portrait of his half-brother, Henry Pelham, titled Boy with a Squirrel, to London to serve as a painted calling card for his talents.

This striking picture, along with Copley’s celebration of craft in Paul Revere (1768) inspired Blindspot’s The Serving Boy, Jameson’s portrait of Weston as a boy with a dog. Both of these canvases hang in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Visitors to Harvard’s Fogg Museum can also see Copley’s portrait of Reverend Edward Holyoke (ca. 1759-1761), evoked in Jameson’s portrait of the Harvard president.

Blindspot’s Fanny Easton shares Copley’s provincial birth, his prodigious talent, and his dauntless ambition. But she is not lucky enough to share his sex. There were very few women painters in the English-speaking world in the eighteenth century. Privileged girls learned to draw, a polite accomplishment like playing the pianoforte and reading a smattering of French. But they were not encouraged to imagine careers at their easels. Only two female artists numbered among the founding members of London’s Royal Academy. Neither was primarily a portraitist. Sitting for one’s portrait was considered an intimate, even erotically charged encounter—a “dangerous employment,” as the essayist William Hazlitt wrote. Staring deeply into his subject’s eyes, the painter, Hazlitt mused, could easily “slide into the lover.” In the eighteenth-century mind, the painter – the looker – was male, the object of his gaze, female. This was why Samuel Johnson found “Publick practice of any art … and staring in men’s faces” to be “very indelicate in a female.” Johnson had experienced this “indelicate” situation first-hand, when he sat for a portrait by Fanny Reynolds, the talented, thwarted, spinster sister of Sir Joshua, whose fate Fanny Easton strives mightily to avoid.

By the early nineteenth century, American cities played host to a number of women artists eking out a modest living by sketching likenesses in pastel, or cutting silhouettes, or painting miniatures. An extraordinary object painted by one of them, Sarah Goodridge, served as the model for the most implausible painting in Blindspot. Fanny’s gift to Jameson, which she calls “Beauty Revealed,” was inspired by inspired by Goodridge’s breathtaking 1828 miniature, watercolor on ivory, titled Beauty Revealed (Self-Portrait), a gift to the man we can only assume was her lover, the senator and orator, Daniel Webster. It is part of the Gloria Mannery Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.