Who Painted the Portrait of Mary Gardner Coffin?

7

BY MARGARET GREENE

IN MARCH 1924 1 the Nantucket Historical Association acquired an unsigned portrait of a woman identified since time remembered as Mary Gardner Coffin. She and her husband Jethro Coffin were the first occupants of the house now known as the Oldest House on island. Though keeping in mind the eccentricities of tradition, there has never been any reason to doubt the identity of the sitter. For many years at Fair Street, the'portrait is now at the Peter Foulger Museum.

Over the years, however, the identity of the painter has been subjected to constant if casual scrutiny, and it is our purpose to track the available commentary from the earliest to the present.

It is helpful to begin with a few recorded dates, relating them throughout to this discussion; a rather cavalier disregard for the passage of time having characterized the attributions of the past and not so far past. According to the Vital Records of Nantucket: 2

Coffin, Jethro, h. Mary . . s. Peter . . and Abigail, born 16,"9 mo. 1663 3

Coffin, Mary w. Jethro . . d. John and Priscilla . . 27 . . 5 mo. 1670 (in Salem) 4 Mary and Jethro were married in 1686,5 making her a very young bride of 16. Starbuck 6 records that all eight of their children were born on Nantucket between 1689 and some years after 1704. And then in 1707 the Oldest House was sold to Nathaniel Paddack.7

Then the following entries come from the Annals of the Town of Mendon,8 in the Uxbridge-Whitinsville area of Massachusetts: p. 167 . . Boston the 27th. of May 1713. The petition of Jethro

Coffin, of Mendon, Mumbly Sheweth, that whereas the General Court of the late Colony of the Massachusetts, in the year

1 Nantucket Historical Association Files. No. 2685 March 1924. 2 Vital Records of Nantucket to the Year 1850 N.E. Historic

Genealogical Society, Boston. 3 V.R.N. 1925 BIRTHS Vol. 1 p. 286. 4 V.R.N. 1926 BIRTHS Vol. 2 p. 57. 5 Oldest House on Nantucket Island, Tristram Coffin, Ed. Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 1911 p. 28. 6 History of Nantucket, Alex. Starbuck, Tuttle-Rutland, Vt. 1969 p. 703. 7 Oldest House, p. 30.

Mary Gardner Coffin Portrait at the Peter Foulger Museum, Nantucket, Mass. Courtesy Frick Art Reference Library."

WHO PAINTED THE PORTRAIT OF MARY GARDNER COFFIN? 9 1672, did Grant unto your Petitioner's Father, Peter Coffin,

Esq. two hundred Acres of upland and about Thirty or

Forty Acres of Meadow, which Grant your Petitioner's said

Father was pleased by deed, to give and make over to your

Petitioner, who herewith presents a Piatt of the Taking up and laying out of the same on the west side of the Township of Mendon . . . p. 179 . . (1718) . . June 23, Jethro Coffin was chosen "granjuriman," being the first notice of such an election . . . p. 181 . . 1719. Feb. 16 . . An account of ye Lots as Drawn for ye Seventh Devision. . . no. 39. Jethro Coffin . . . p. 187 . . 1720. March 7. Being the annual Town Meeting . . For

Selectmen . . . Jethro Coffin . . .

In the Nantucket Vital Records Jethro is listed as having died in 1726.9 In the Nantucket Probate Records there is no evidence that he made a will; nor is there record of probate when, many years later, Mary died in 1767, aged 97.'0

Over a century later, in 1887, Mrs. Eunice C. G. Brooks, a great, great, great, great grand-daughter of Mary Gardner Coffin, who had inherited the portrait, wrote:

Nantucket, Feb. 17th, 1887. Captain Brooks took the portrait to the photographer yesterday and had it photographed.

I send you the proof. The face looks just like that of the portrait, but the hair does not show in the painting very well, and it makes the proof look badly. If it were touched up with crayon it might improve it.

The late Alan Burroughs of the Fogg Museum at Harvard, who was one of the first in the 1930s to take a professional interest in the very early New England portraits, once remarked that all unsigned portraits thought to have been painted in Boston were hopefully assigned to John Smibert or even more hopefully to John Singleton Copley; and such was the case here.

The Boston Sunday Globe, Aug. 8, 1897, carried an article on Nantucket's Oldest House. The writer says: "Jethro Coffin and his wife were doubtless wealthy people, as is evidenced by the portrait of the latter, which still hangs in the house of Capt. Brooks on the Cliff. It was done by Copley, and Mrs. Coffin made three journeys to Boston for sittings to the famous artist." The editor of The Oldest House, who quoted this article, made short work of the Copley attribution by pointing out that at the time of Copley's birth (1738) Mary Gardner Coffin was approaching 70 years of age. 8 Annals of the Town of Mendon, John G. Metcalf, Freeman

Providence, R.I. 1880. 9 V.R.N. Vol. V DEATHS p. 162.

V.R.N. Vol. V DEATHS p. 170. " 0. H. underneath photograph of portrait, p. 84.

Nhv

Ann Pollard Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Association

WHO PAINTED THE PORTRAIT OF MARY GARDNER COFFIN? 11

The accessions card (No. 2685) in the files of the Nantucket Historical Association has only the following entries under the date March 1924: "From Mrs. Eunice Gardner Brooks," and, "painted 1717." There is no mention of the three legendary trips to Boston cited by the Globe. Mrs. Brooks died without having made a will in 1924 and there is no mention of the portrait in the inventory of her estate.

At this point we take up the comments of art "experts" and of students working in the field of primitive painting. They describe this portrait as in the European tradition, oval background, right arm crossed in front holding a flower in attenuated fingers, triangular neckline.12 In the files of the N.H.A. there is a letter to Dr. Will Gardner, then Vice-President, dated 1955 from Nathaniel Pousette-Dart whose letterhead reads "Art Consultant, New York City." The gentleman states that he has examined the portrait carefully and considers it to have been undoubtedly done by John Smibert.

12 There seems no reason to dispute the date 1717 at which time

Mary Gardner Coffin would have been 47. Miss Louisa Dresser to whom we will refer later, mentions that early artists frequently derived costumes from prints and so Mary's can't be used as a basis for dating the painting.

Mr. Pousette-Dart either considered the portrait to be at least 12 years later than 1717 — but he doesn't say so; or he strangely ignored the dates of Smibert's years in this country. The latter's arrival in the entourage of Bishop Berkeley, Jan. 1729 at Newport, R. I., and his removal to Boston in May of that year are a matter of record. In any case, the discovery in 1958 of Smibert's notebook, which is now preserved in the Public Record Office, London, and has been published by the Massachusetts Historical Society confirms the date:13

In September the 4th. 1728 I set out for Rhod Island from

London in company with the Revd. Bean Berkeley &c in the

Lucy . . . From May 1729 Smibert lists the portraits he painted in Boston and there is no mention of Mary Gardner Coffin.

First Flowers of Our Wilderness, by James Thomas Flexner, first published in 1947, has this to day:14 "I tentatively attribute to the Pollard Limner the following portraits: (1) Mrs. Jethro Coffin (Mary Gardner) . . (3) Mrs. John Dolbeare . Flexner illustrates both Ann Pollard and Mrs. Dolbeare. The latter was no beauty but a relationship between the three portraits would

12

HISTORIC NANTUCKET

seem to require investigation. While a technical analysis of the paintings is out of place here, Flexner calls it the "Artisan School." And he goes on to describe the portrait of Ann Pollard which is signed

Aetatis Suae 100 & 3 months Apr. 11 1721 as the prototype and jewel of a group painted in Boston.

The Pollard attribution should be understood to refer not necessarily to a single painter but to several working in the same manner.

Not too long ago, Mary Black, Director of the Museum of Fork Art in New York City, cast her eye over Mary Gardner and left a short comment to be added to the Association file card. She noted the relationship to Ann Pollard.

Finally our great thanks go to Miss Louisa Dresser, Curator of the Collections of the Worcester Art Museum. It was she who introduced me to the Annals of the Town of Mendon, thus resolving the problem of Mary's whereabouts in 1717 and the awkward matter of her three trips to Boston. And it is Miss Dresser who concludes her study of "portraits in Boston, 16301720" with Mrs. Coffin and Mrs. Pollard as examples of the socalled Thacher-Pollard group and the end of an era. For the moment, her discussion printed in the Journal of the Archives of the Smithsonian Institution (July-October 1966) is a point of rest in a continued effort to clear away confusion and piece together the existing bits of evidence.

13 Notebook of John Smibert, Mass. Historical Society, Boston

1969. p. 86.

14 First Floivers of Our Wilderness, James Thomas Flexner, Dover 1969 p. 288 . . . Illustrations pps. 48 and 50.