The Recovery of John Francis Rigaud's Portrait of Joseph Brant

The many portraits of Mohawk leader Thayendanegea (also known as Joseph Brant (1743–1807)) demonstrate how Brant used portraiture as a tool for public purposes and how portraiture acted as a virtual avatar for this important figure.¹ These portraits constitute his personal portrait gallery and continue to captivate our imagination due to the robust character of their sitter and to the significant and controversial role that he undertook on behalf of both Indigenous and colonial settler loyalists before, during, and after the American War of Independence (1775–83).²

This article will reexamine the known existing portraits of Joseph Brant painted in oil on canvas and present new information that led to the recovery of the lost oil portrait of Brant painted by the Royal Academician, John Francis Rigaud (1742–1810), for public display in London at the annual Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition in 1786.³ A succinct overview of the various known oil portraits of Brant lets us discern three distinct phases of Brant's portraiture: (a) works painted in England between 1776 and 1786 as tributes honoring his military exploits during his lifetime; (b) portraits produced as historical chronicles during his lifetime after the American War, in both Canada and the United States, from 1786 until his death in 1807; and (c) works painted as commemorations contrived after his death and based on earlier lifetime portraits. These three distinct phases define the order and transformative evolution of Brant's portraiture over time, and also provide a precise framework to better reference and articulate their function, intent, and purposes, the circumstances of their conception and creation, and the structure of their form, which together reveal their underlying meanings and historical influences and uses.

The first oil portraits of Joseph Brant were painted during his two short visits to London, England: first in 1776, to assess the benefits and to negotiate the engagement of North American Indigenous peoples as allies of Great Britain at the beginning of the American War, and second in 1786, to seek compensations for the human, material, and territorial losses, and to seek redress for the exile that his people had incurred at the conclusion of the war. Though the human and territorial rights of North American Indigenous peoples were totally ignored in the Treaty of Paris of 1783, Brant arrived in London not only as a peacemaker, but also as a founding member of a new Indian Confederacy that was ready to confront the new U.S. government's further territorial encroachment on unceded Indigenous lands.⁴

The only tribute portrait of Brant painted in oil during his first visit to London in 1776 was a life-size, three-quarter length composition by George Romney (1734–1802). It was commissioned by and for the private use of George Greville, second Earl of Warwick (1746–1816). This portrait has hung in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa since 1922, and was the first English portrait of Brant to be publicly displayed in North America.⁵ During Brant's second sojourn in London in 1786, Brant sat again for three additional tribute portraits. The first was commissioned and painted by John Francis Rigaud, which became the first oil portrait of Brant to be publicly exhibited in Britain, but it vanished after the artist's death in 1811 and has never been traced since. That spring, Brant also sat for two privately commissioned, smaller, half-length oil portraits, both painted by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828).⁶ The first (figure 9) was done at the behest of Francis Rawdon, second Earl of Moira (1754–1826), and is now in the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York,⁷ of which two anonymous early copies are known to exist: one at the British Museum, London (figure 10) since ca. 1896,⁸ and another in the Olive Blake-Lloyd collection in England, about which little is known.⁹ The second (figure 8), commissioned by Sir Hugh Percy (1742–1817), the future second Duke of Northumberland, remained in his family until it was sold to an anonymous private collector...