AFA Winter 2017

Winter 86 www.afamag.com |  www.incollect.com Fig. 5: Thomas Jefferson Wright (1798–1846), Portrait of George Howard, Mt. Sterling, Ky., ca. 1815. Oil on canvas, 29½ x 24½ inches. Museum Purchase, The Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections Fund (2015.100.1). Fig. 6: Thomas Jefferson Wright (1798–1846), Portrait of Cassandra Hukill Howard, Mt. Sterling, Ky., ca. 1815. Oil on canvas, 29½ x 24½ inches. Museum Purchase, The Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections Fund (2015.100.2). Philadelphia must also have piqued the curiosity of other citizens eager to learn more about inland territories. As people moved, painters followed. Some took advantage of local newspapers and announced their arrival in a town. The Massachusetts artist Cephas Thompson routinely informed residents when and where he could be “entirely devoted to their accommodation.”  2 The locations he worked in are also recorded in his surviving “Memorandum of Portraits,” along with the names of his sitters for the years 1806 to 1822. 3 The book records 541 likenesses. He traveled to Virginia for the bulk of these commissions, visiting Alexandria, Richmond, and Norfolk for six consecutive winters. Thompson rendered these rare small panel portraits of Norfolk banker Thomas Williamson and his wife Anne McClelland McCauley Walke Williamson, in Norfolk, Virginia (Figs. 1, 2). Like many painters, Thompson relied on the network of patronage for his commissions. His success in Virginia, seen in the completion of 104 canvases in only a six-month period, was no doubt in part due to the familial ties among his subjects, as well as word of mouth among his clients, all prominent citizens working as attorneys, bankers, politicians, and merchants. For Thompson, Williamson was an extraordinary connection. A self-described “patron of the arts,” Williamson reportedly added “some dozen” commissioned portraits by the artist to his painting collection. 4 While Thompson returned home to Massachusetts in between his travels, fellow painter Ralph E. W. Earl relocated entirely from the region. After receiving training from his painter father, Ralph Earl, the younger Earl studied in London with American expatriates Benjamin West (1738–1820) and John Trumbull (1756–1843). In 1817, he returned to America with hopes of pursuing historical painting. His decision to depict the Battle of New Orleans took him to Nashville, Tennessee, where he rendered military heroes and met Andrew Jackson. The two formed a lifelong relationship that prompted Earl to follow Jackson to the White House and later to Jackson’s Tennessee home, the Hermitage, where the artist remained until his death in 1838. Earl found numerous commissions with Jackson and his friends and associates, including that of Thomas Claiborne, a major during the Creek War, and his wife, Sarah Martin Lewis King Claiborne (Figs. 3, 4). Kentucky-born painter Thomas Jefferson Wright was among several first-generation artists from that region to move to Philadelphia with the hope of receiving artistic training from the acclaimed portraitist Thomas Sully. 5 An extant letter from