By Jonathan Schroeder

John Jacobs at First Sight

By Jonathan Schroeder, Ph.D. Visiting Professor in American Studies, Brandeis University

The story of how I located the portrait of John Jacobs is a long one. It begins with meeting Kathryn Grover, who probably knows more about New England African American history than anyone. When I told her I was researching the life of Harriet Jacobs’s brother, she mentioned that she had included a painting in a 1991 exhibition at the New Bedford Whaling Museum that she thought might be of John. Known then as The Man Holding the Liberator, the painting had portrait painter been loaned from the Balch Institute of Ethnic Studies, an institution that no longer exists. I was on the trail. I soon learned that the Balch had merged with the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in 2002, and, after emailing them, a curator named Sarah Heim sent me scans of their folder on the painting, including my first view: a photocopy of a photocopy of a photo of the painting. The loss of quality of an image between copies is known as “generation loss,” and the loss of detail here was everywhere to be seen; and yet, against the nameless, soggy, boggy, squitchy black mass of a background, John Jacobs’s face peers out, unobscured, with a smile that begets a thousand questions.

Liberator (March 24, 1848). Ad for Jacobs’s upcoming lecture dates, including his stop in New Bedford on April 16.

From a letter in the folder, I learned that a scholar named Juliette Tomlinson had been researching the painting in 1986-87. As the leading (and quite

The xerox of the painting in the Frick files

possibly only) expert on a prolific nineteenth-century portrait painter named Joseph Whiting Stock, she was invited to Philadelphia and verified the artist of the painting as Stock. When I looked in Tomlinson’s research, I found that her archive is in the Frick Museum Art Reference Library, and includes a folder of documents she’d amassed on the painting. For the better part of a year, I was unable to get a scan. Then the pandemic brought the world to a standstill, closed institutions, and stalled the Frick’s move of their archives to a new building. In September 2021, however, there it was: an email from the Frick with a paperclip next to it. As the pdf and jpegs downloaded at dial-up speed, I held my breath. When I clicked on the first image, I saw a scan of the photo of the painting that was high-res and still frustratingly in black-and-white. Still, I knew I’d gotten closer to where I now knew I needed to go: the painting itself, which I had come to believe was lost somewhere in the off-site storage of the African American Museum

of Philadelphia, which had received a donation of all of the Balch and HSP’s African American-related materials after their merger. Faced with another dead end, I looked more closely at the new image I’d just received. The sitter is in a black jacket and tie, his hand grasping an April 1848 copy of the Liberator and resting easily on the arm of a chair, and he is posed against a background with a velvet curtain tied back by a tassel—most likely the props that the artist used to help portray his male sitters as cultivated, refined, professional men—which was a big part of Stock’s stockin-trade.

compiled a list of nine possible sitters: Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, Douglass, Richard T. Greener, John Jones, “Leisendorff of San Francisco,” William Cooper Nell, Charles Lenox Remond, and William Whipper. The list is mostly ludicrous: Greener was four-years old in 1848, William Whipper 44 and heavyset, Henry Bibb was a Liberty party supporter and called an “enemy” of the Liberator, John Jones lived in Chicago, and William Leidesdorff in San Francisco, and Charles Lenox Remond was much skinnier, darker, and clearly balding. Douglass had already begun the North Star, which signaled his break Tomlinson’s Frick file actually from the orthodox principles turned out to hold the Balch of Garrisonianism—such curator Betty Louchheim’s as non-violence instead of research memorandum violence, and moral suasion “Search for the artist and the over political action—and he sitter of ‘The Man Holding kept his hair “natural” in the the Liberator.’” Louchheim style of Alexandre Dumas, had made an expansive in contrast to the sitter here, search in 1986-1987, whose hair is neatly parted contacting an entire page and, though not straightened, of institutions and experts, neatly coiffed. The scholar from John Hope Franklin Sidney Kaplan’s suggestion to Benjamin Quarles, the Schomburg Center to the A photograph of the painting taken the moment it was unwrapped after being in storage for 30 years. Photo by of Nell is a good one, but it is unlikely that Nell was in New National Portrait Gallery, Renee Altergott. Bedford in April 1848, the and the Tuskegee Institute to Bowdoin College. date of the newspaper in the sitters’ hands, because Mostly consisting of Louchheim’s correspondence he had moved to Rochester the previous winter and with Tomlinson, the dossier makes clear that the pair begun editing Douglass’s paper.1 Brown is also a good did not know very much about African American choice, since he was lecturing in Massachusetts in history, art, or culture. “I really can’t suggest who April 1848, was the highest paid agent of Garrison’s the subject of the portrait might be,” Tomlinson Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and was lightwrites Louchheim, “You mentioned there was a skinned. However, I have not discovered any large negro colony in New Bedford at that time so document that puts Brown in New Bedford that it could be anyone.” The two corresponded regularly month and in terms of appearance, Brown does not in the months before Tomlinson’s visit to Philly, and have a beard in surviving images and was usually in another letter Louchheim found it impossible to portrayed with a widow’s peak. So it’s probably not rule out Frederick Douglass as the sitter, even as she him. learned that in April 1848 Douglass was already at odds with William Lloyd Garrison and his paper and John Jacobs was also on the payroll of the MA-SS was already well on his way to becoming the most that year. Unlike Brown, he had strong ties to New photographed person of the nineteenth century. Bedford, having escaped there in 1839 and worked

From the responses she received, Louchheim

[C. M.] Gilbert Studios. Portrait of Harriet Jacobs, Washington, DC, 1894. Public domain. on the ship Frances Henrietta of New Bedford, 1839-1843, on a sperm and right whaling voyage to the Pacific Ocean. In April 1848, when Jacobs and Jonathan Walker finished two days of lecturing in Nantucket, they took the morning steamship, Massachusetts, for the mainland. Entering New Bedford, the thirty-sixth destination on a grueling interstate tour, Jacobs must have felt a burst of emotion at the sight of his old city again, and may have even thought of it as a homecoming, since the whaling city had given him some of the protections, employment, and community that make a home possible. John saw the whaling ships, candle and ropeworks, and other markers of industry that he and his ancestors knew well, and that would later become his life. He was delighted by the chance to see old friends, escape from the “mobocratic” spirit of small-town racists, and get away from living and working in such cramped quarters with the cranky, severe Walker. And Boston and a visit to his sister and his niece and nephew were only a few days away. In good spirits, John likely walked the hilly cobblestone streets of New Bedford’s downtown, passing the Bethel Methodist Episcopal church where Douglass had begun preaching, the signs for William Howland’s free produce store, and the Tabers’ bookstore that had probably sold him the primers and books that he had used to teach himself to read. Perhaps he fantasized while passing that one day Taber’s might sell his book, which he had already begun to work out by performing his life’s story before American audiences. Did he then walk off the street into Stock’s studio?2 When he met Stock, he found the man sitting in a recent invention called a wheelchair, which a Boston doctor had built especially for Stock, who had been paralyzed as a boy when an oxcart fell on him. Jacobs, who had seen the frontispieces of Douglass and Brown, knew the importance of self-portraiture, and perhaps he too wanted a picture that preserved the talents he had worked hard to cultivate and worked even harder to preserve during his slavery days.

The case that the sitter in this painting is John Jacobs is therefore a strong one. But it’s far from airtight and it’s important to recognize why. Most obviously, how can you determine what someone looks like when you’ve never seen them before? When the archives erase or scatter so much information? Is this the man who was described as able to pass for “Italian”? Even after you rule out the options based on pictures of famous African Americans that do survive, all you can really do is make an educated guess. So let’s hope that this is a picture of John Jacobs.

If it is, the story gets even better. A few months after I received the Frick files, I hired a research assistant in Philadelphia and asked her to pay a visit to the AAMP and see what she could turn up. Curators Dejay Duckett and Zindzi Harley found the painting right away—it wasn’t off-site at all, but in the main vault in the building. A few days later, I received high-res color photographs, which revealed details

2 “In May of 1847 Stock was in New Bedford, where he painted

Captain Stephen Christian in May of that year, a work he signed and dated. Because there is no listing for him in the 1848 Springfield

Directory, it may be assumed that he extended his stay in New

Bedford.” Juliette Tomlinson, “A Biographical Note,” in

The Paintings and Journal of Joseph Whiting Stock (Middletown,

CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1976), xi.

about Jacobs and the background that had been all but invisible. A laurel pattern appears on the curtain, the tassel is shown to be tied to a column—perhaps props of Stock’s to suggest higher learning, which in the nineteenth century meant learning the classics. A few days later, I took the train down and saw the painting for myself, not because I really believed I would discover more than what the camera had already revealed, but because I wanted to be in the presence of this object that had come to play such an important part in my life.

This is a remarkable painting of a remarkable individual. John Jacobs was a Black citizen of the world who lived as a slave in North Carolina, an abolitionist in New England, and a sailor in every port of call in the world, from the first time he sailed out of New Bedford to the last voyage he took— from London to Bangkok—in 1869-70. Jacobs was also the author of not one but two autobiographical slave narratives. Did he want to use this painting as the frontispiece for the autobiography he would later publish in Australia in 1855, The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots? The answer is unknown, but nonetheless, if this is truly John Jacobs, this painting represents one of his greatest achievements. “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists,” Douglass wrote at the time. “It seems next to impossible for white men to take likenesses of black men, without most grossly exaggerating their distinctive features.”3 And yet somehow Jacobs managed to convince a hostile world to recognize him and give him respect.

3 Frederick Douglass, “Negro Portraits,” Liberator (April 20, 1849): 62.

Letter from Betty Louchheim of the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies to Juliette Tomlinson concerning the identity of the sitter of the painting.