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Chapter 11: Lexington Limners: Portrait Painters in the “Athens of the West”
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11 Lexington Limners Portrait Painters in the “Athens of the West” Estill Curtis Pennington At the same time Lexington was being “transformed from a rude frontier post into an attractive community of fine homes, landed estates, and diverse manufacturing and mercantile enterprises,” the lives and works of portrait artists became a part of the dynamic popular culture of the “Athens of the West.”1 These artists can be seen as messengers of style, as participants in the transformation, as those who imparted to a Transylvanian community the international tastes and aesthetic values then current among artists and patrons in more established urban areas. The art of portraiture is the most reciprocal form of the visual arts, primarily because of the equation it sets in motion: artists need jobs, and sitters want a pleasing likeness, informed by the acknowledged fashion of the day. To comprehend that fashion requires hearing the accounts set down by contemporaries and seeing the verisimilitude of detail between precedent and product. First sightings of those artists are sparse in detail and concerned with itinerant vagary. Samuel Woodson Price reports a mythic portraitist named “West” who came across the mountains from Maryland in the late 1790s, but this artist has never been identified as Price seems to have been confused about the family relationships of Edward West Jr., artist, inventor , and entrepreneur in Lexington.2 Similar confusion has been made between an early settler, Richard Terrell, who was not an artist, and the artist Richard Terrell, who appeared in Indiana in 1828. Edward West Jr. may be regarded as the first resident limner in town. A native of Virginia, he and his family appear in the 1790 Bourbon County Kentucky census, prior to moving to Lexington around 1792. A silver- 240 Lexington Limners 241 smith and a miniaturist, a man “of all work, all ideas,” West, recalled his contemporary Samuel McCullough, “could make a watch or a clock, or he could mend one. He could make a rifle or a gun, or he could mend one, within my recollection he could make or mend anything.”3 Two of West’s sons, John Brown and William Edward, began to paint miniatures at an early age. William Edward West would go on to become one of the most famous American portraitists of the nineteenth century, even as his father nurtured several younger portrait artists in his hometown. There was a very notable arrival in 1806, when the English landscape artist George Beck arrived and advertised in the Kentucky Gazette as a portrait painter.4 Though no likenesses by him have been found, an important landscape painting of the iron furnace at Owingsville is extant. Beck, an instructor at Transylvania, also translated classic Greek and Roman poetry, which he published in the Kentucky Gazette of October 27 and November 3, 1806. His wife, Mary, listed as a miniaturist, is better known for having taught young ladies drawing classes in Lexington. Another early artist, who left a dastardly legacy, was Samuel Dearborn, often said to have been the first practicing portraitist west of the mountains .5 A native of Boston, he worked in Pittsburgh as early as 1804 and appeared in Lexington by 1809. Though somewhat competent in oil, he more energetically pursued profile painting in watercolor. Advertising his services in the Kentucky Gazette of May 1, 1809, he encouraged those who wish to have their portraits painted “to apply soon”: “The low price which he asks for his small likenesses on paper is expected to induce many to substitute them for blank profiles [a reference to the art of the silhouette].” Dearborn subsequently went to Frankfort, where he was involved in a violent episode evolving from a sharp rebuke on his landlady’s housekeeping by a fellow boarder, Isaac Robertson, an up-and-coming bureaucrat in the government of the commonwealth. According to Love family accounts, Dearborn, on April 17, 1811, “having secured a dirk, made a cowardly attack upon Mr. Robertson, while he was seated in the garden . . . surrounded by his little children and entirely unarmed, and stabbed him savagely.”6 Later that day Robertson died. After the murder, Dearborn escaped jail and disappeared from Kentucky. Finding his way back to Boston, he changed his name to Nathaniel and produced some engraved “views of little merit.”7 He died in 1852, having gotten away with murder, but also having left behind a handful of the earliest documented profile portraits in Kentucky. By 1808, Matthew Harris...