Another Portrait of Maria Gratz at the Rosenbach

Maria Cecil Gist Gratz (Mrs. Benjamin Gratz)

by Thomas Sully.  Oil on canvas.  Philadelphia, PA, 1831.

Courtesy of the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

Gift of John H. Thomas in memory of Hermine Cary Gratz Johnstone.

2012.0004

In 2011, Judith Guston, the Curator at the Rosenbach, enlisted my blog in a search.  For 40 years the Museum had owned a portrait of Benjamin Gratz (Rebecca's younger brother), painted in 1831 by Thomas Sully.  Although Sully's ledger had also listed a portrait of Ben's wife Maria, done at the same time, its whereabouts were unknown and had remained that way for four decades.

My job was to write a post about the missing painting in the hopes that its current owner might see it.  I published "Have You Seen Maria?" in June of 2011 and three weeks later Guston received a call from Maria Gratz Roberts in Atlanta, Georgia.  For the full story, see the follow-up post, "Found," from February 2012.

The reunion of the portraits was covered locally and in the art press and was also picked up by the Associated Press.  The story appeared in more than 200 newspapers.

Soon after, Guston received another call, this time from Jeannette Thomas in California, who is the wife of a great-great-grandson of Ben and Maria.  She said that she had a portrait just like the one of Maria she had seen publicized, the only difference being the presence of the date "1831" and Sully's characteristic initials "TS" on hers.  (The Maria portrait from Georgia had already been authenticated as a Sully, but it lacked signature and date -- omissions which were not unusual when Sully painted two portraits to be hung together.)

After a quick trip to California, Guston affirmed that the West Coast Maria was the original portrait, painted from life.  Furthermore, she was able to report that  John Thomas had made a gift of the painting to the Rosenbach.

So where did that leave Maria from Georgia?  The most likely story is that after Maria died at 44 in 1841,  Ben, in Lexington, Kentucky, wanted a copy of her portrait which hung in Rebecca Gratz's parlor in Philadelphia.  The family commissioned the copy from Sully himself.  Georgia Maria is the result.

If you come to the Rosenbach you can see both portraits in the parlor.  Georgia Maria is on the wall beside Sully's portrait of her husband, and West Coast Maria sits on an easel between the two.  The two Maria's are the work of the same hand and very similar, but Sully did not try to make an exact copy.  Visitors find the differences both fascinating and perplexing.

Found: The Lost Portraits of Mrs. Benjamin Gratz

Maria Cecil Gist Gratz (Mrs. Benjamin Gratz)

by Thomas Sully. Oil on canvas, Philadelphia, 1831.

Courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library.

Gift of Maria Gratz Roberts. 2011.0023.00l.

Photograph by Douglas A. Lockhard

Last spring Judith Guston, the curator of the Rosenbach Museum & Library, asked me to write a blog post about a painting which neither of us had ever seen: a portrait, by Thomas Sully, of Maria, the wife of Rebecca's brother Benjamin Gratz.

The Museum's interest in this painting began more than 40 years ago when the Rosenbach received a bequest from Ben's granddaughter which included Sully's portrait of Ben, painted in Philadelphia in 1831. The artist's records show that he had also painted Maria at the time, but where was she? Henrietta Clay, who gave the bequest, had heard that the painting existed but had no idea where it was. This is not too surprising because the Kentucky Gratz's are a large family. Miss Clay, a descendant of Ben's second wife (Maria was his first), was in the wrong line of descent to know much about Maria.

In 1984 the Rosenbach received another Gratz bequest, this time from the widow of a descendant of Maria's. She knew the Museum was looking for Sully's painting, and she reported it had already disappeared by the time she married into the family. She gave the Rosenbach a lovely portrait of a youthful Maria, by Matthew Harris Jouett. And she included in her bequest a photo of what she termed "a crayon copy" (a pastel) of the Sully portrait, which I would eventually use in my blog post.

Years passed, and the Maria portrait never made an appearance at auction, with a dealer or in an art publication. So the Rosenbach took a shot with my blog, and it was no sure thing. The portrait could well have been in the hands of someone who did not know the sitter or the painter and would never find my post. Or the painting might turn up in another institution, no longer a possible addition for the Rosenbach.

I published the post at the beginning of June, thinking we should probably give it a year or two. I did not know that a Gratz descendant in Georgia was already acquainted with my blog and checked it from time to time. Three weeks later our curator got a call from Atlanta. Maria Gratz Roberts, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Ben and Maria, had the original Sully portrait in her parlor. It had been given to her father by his great-uncle, a grandson of Ben and Maria, no later than 1935. And although Maria Gratz Roberts had lived with the painting throughout her life, she, like us, had the romantic notion that Ben and Maria's portraits should be together again.

What's more, Ms. Roberts proposed that she GIVE the Rosenbach the Sully portrait of Maria, the pastel copy which she also owned and a chair that Ben had brought from Pennsylvania. This incredible generosity was much more than anyone could have imagined at the beginning of our search. I know from my work with the Gratz correspondence how much Rebecca Gratz and her family admired Maria Roberts' great-great-great-grandparents and their happy marriage. It is absolutely fitting that their portraits be reunited. I hope our benefactor will visit the paintings at the Museum and accept our thanks in person.

But wait!  Another descendant contacted the Rosenbach.  The result is this.

Thomas Sully's 1831 portrait of Maria will go on display to the public on Saturday, February 11th, just in time for the Rosenbach's annual Romance Tours which take place that weekend. They will be spotlighting those objects in our collections which have romantic associations -- the portraits of Ben and Maria, a love letter by John Keats, Lord Byron's marriage license and much more. Click here for information about the tours and their times.

If you would like to know more about the artist Thomas Sully, you can get an interesting perspective on his work on Feb. 15th. Carol Soltis, Associate Curator at the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be giving a talk at the Rosenbach on "Thomas Sully's Ladies: Real, Imagined and Literary." Click here for more information.

The Lost Portraits of Mrs. Benjamin Gratz: Have You Seen Maria?

Photo of a "crayon" copy of the portrait of Mrs. Benjamin Gratz (Maria

Cecil Gist) by Thomas Sully, Philadelphia, 1831. Courtesy of the Rosenbach

Museum & Library. From the bequest of Mrs. Anderson Gratz, 1984.

Just as Rebecca Gratz was having her portrait painted by Thomas Sully in December of 1830, her brother and sister-in-law Benjamin and Maria Gratz arrived from their home in Lexington, KY, for a long visit in Philadelphia.

Sully's portrait must have been deemed successful because the family decided that he should paint portraits of Ben and Maria for the Philadelphia Gratz's. In April 1831, he produced them and, at Maria's request, then painted another portrait of Rebecca to go back to Kentucky.

Three of these four paintings reside today at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia:

Sully's first portrait of Rebecca, his portrait of Benjamin and his second painting of Rebecca, all given by or acquired from Gratz descendants. But no one knows what has become of Sully's portrait of Maria Cecil Gist Gratz, Ben's wife. Although a family member gave the Museum Matthew Jouett's portrait of Maria, done around the time of her marriage, it would certainly be nice to see her companion portrait by Sully beside that of her husband.

We are fortunate that among the materials which one Gratz descendant provided was the photograph, reproduced above, of a copy of the painting of Maria. This version is supposed to have been done in pastels, but the artist and date are unknown, as is its whereabouts.

We also know that Rebecca Gratz had the artist John Henry Brown make a miniature from Sully's original painting of Maria in 1844. The Rosenbach has a photograph of it in its collection, but Brown's portrait itself has also disappeared.

Although it is certainly possible that one of these likenesses might have been accidentally destroyed in the course of time, it seems unlikely that not a single one has survived. So look around, check the attic and friends' homes, visit your local museum. If you have seen one of these pictures of Maria, or own one of them, please contact Judith Guston, the curator at the Rosenbach, or me.

February 2012, update: For information on how two of these portraits were found, click here.

Benjamin Gratz, Rebecca's Youngest Brother

Benjamin Gratz
by Thomas Sully. Oil on wood, Philadelphia, 1831. Courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library. Gift

of Henrietta Gratz Clay. 1954.1937

(To see Sully's companion portrait of his wife Maria, click here.)

Just a few days before Ben's fifteenth birthday (Sept. 4, 1807), Rebecca reported that he was continuing to grow in "manliness, beauty and graceful manners." "He will be a gentleman," she assured Jo, another brother.

Rebecca almost never wrote of physical beauty in her letters, as seems to have been the custom of the day. Usually, that type of praise was saved for children. It may be that she still saw her baby brother as a child, but the good looks Rebecca discerned in him are reflected in Sully's portrait of Ben at 38 (above) and his gentlemanly qualities attested to by his life.

Ben attended the University of Pennsylvania and received his bachelor's degree in 1811. In 1812, at the beginning of the war, he volunteered, but was called up only in 1814 when it seemed as though the British would attack Philadelphia after burning Washington. A second lieutenant in Capt. John Swift's company of the Washington Guards, he spent several months on active duty. Rebecca worried that camp life would be too hard for him but Ben seems to have thrived on it.

Sometime during the period 1812-1815 Ben studied law in the office of a family friend William Meredith, and in 1815 was admitted to the Philadelphia bar. He received a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania the same year. In the summer of 1818 when he first met Maria Cecil Gist, he was preparing to go west to pursue a law suit for the partners (which included the Gratz family) of the Illinois & Wabash Company.

Rebecca, who liked to keep her family close, was alarmed by Ben's letters proclaiming his enthusiasm for the West. Perhaps even without Maria he would have settled in Kentucky. The period was a time of the greatest internal migration in American history: people in the south were flooding into Alabama and Mississippi to plant the rich land there with cotton; New Englanders, reeling from 1816, the year without a summer, were moving down into the Ohio Valley for a longer growing season. As new towns sprang up, each needed clergy, a doctor, a schoolmaster, a lawyer and businessmen. Even young men like Ben, from the eastern social elite, were attracted to the West where they felt they could make their mark.

Ben probably found a reason to go to Lexington in the autumn of 1818, and evidence from his correspondence shows that he wintered in Vincennes and was back in Lexington in the spring of 1819. He returned to Philadelphia and, in the fall of 1819, was in Lexington again, this time to stay. There is no information on when he proposed to Maria Cecil Gist, but he would not have done so unless he had the means to support a wife in Kentucky.

Somewhere along the way he attracted the interest of Col. James Morrison, one of the founders of Lexington. The Gratz family had long held land in Kentucky, and Morrison would have known them by reputation and perhaps had met some of the Gratz men. In any case, to a city father who hoped to make his town "the Athens of the West," a young man with a master's degree and legal and business experience would be a gift from heaven. Morrison probably facilitated what would be a lucrative business. He, John Bruce, a local Scottish immigrant who had experience in the manufacturing of rope, and Benjamin Gratz entered into a partnership to make rope in Lexington and provide it at a cheaper price to the West than that produced on the east coast. I assume that Ben, who would also be in charge of the business side of the endeavor, and Morrison provided most of the money to get their factory started.

The Gratz fortune is something of a mystery. The father, Michael Gratz, who had land holdings all over the country, died intestate in 1811. The three eldest brothers seem to have made an attempt to divide the lands among the siblings, but gave up just about the time Ben returned to Philadelphia in 1819: everything went into a family trust, and how it was administered is unknown by me. Ben would have been looking for some investment money when he was in Philadelphia and seems to have gotten it, but whether it came from the estate or a loan from a brother is another question mark.

In any case, the partnership was created and Maria accepted his proposal of marriage. All Ben had to do was to write to Rebecca, who seems to have been unaware of these events, to tell her that he would be settling in Lexington, Kentucky, with a non-Jewish wife.

To continue, click here.

(Rebecca's letter is in the Washington Irving Collection, Clifton Waller Library of American Literature, University of Virginia.)

Maria Cecil Gist, Rebecca's Sister-In-Law

Maria Cecil Gist (detail)

by Matthew Harris Jouett. Oil on convas, Lexington, KY, 1820-25. Courtesy of Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Anderson Gratz 1984.0005.

The dearest friend and most faithful correspondent of Rebecca's middle years was her non-Jewish sister-in-law in Kentucky, Maria Cecil Gist Gratz (1797-1841). Maria's acquaintance with the Gratz family began, not with Benjamin, her future husband, but with Rebecca, whom she met when she accompanied her mother and her ailing sister to Philadelphia in 1818 in search of medical assistance.

Despite the sixteen years difference in age, Rebecca did not fall into the "aunt" role which characterized her relationships with so many younger men and women. Maria's intelligence, her literary interests, her charming personality and, as their friendship progressed, the revelation that she too was a spiritual pilgrim would serve to cement a friendship between equals.

This is Rebecca's description of Maria Gist shortly after she met her (note the use of the terms "good sense" and "sensible," which were Rebecca's highest forms of praise):

"[S]he is a girl of great good sense and has a cultivated mind. Too remote from fashionable education to be accomplished in music and dancing she has bestowed more time in reading and as her family were genteel and well-bred and her education directed by a sensible woman [Maria's mother] her manners are exceedingly frank and engaging. Indeed I have rarely met with persons more calculated to attract affection...."

Socially and economically, the two were peers. Maria's father, Nathaniel Gist, a Revolutionary War veteran, received a large land grant and moved his family from Virginia to their new estate Canewood outside of Lexington, Kentucky in the 1790's. A decade after his death, his widow had married General Charles Scott who soon after become governor of Kentucky (1808-1812). Like Rebecca, Maria had grown up as part of the local elite.

The two women had just met when Maria's sister died suddenly. Rebecca offered the hospitality of the Gratz home to Maria and her mother so that they could mourn in private among people who sympathized rather than continue at the public boardinghouse where they had been staying.

If he had not been introduced to her earlier in her visit, Benjamin Gratz, Rebecca's youngest brother, made Maria's acquaintance during the two weeks she and her mother spent in the Gratz household before they returned to Kentucky. Since he was about to go west on business Mrs. Scott and Maria invited him to Canewood when he was in the area. Ben left a few weeks after Maria started her trip home. At Baltimore, he received a letter from Rebecca saying that she had heard from Maria: "She writes charmingly & sends kind messages to you" [Rebecca's emphasis]. If Ben had not already determined to visit Canewood at his earliest opportunity, this message would have certainly encouraged him to do so. Benjamin Gratz would return to Philadelphia many times in the course of his long life, but he would never live there again: his future was in Kentucky and with Maria.

(Rebecca's description of Maria is in a letter to Maria Fenno Hoffman in the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society. Her letter to Ben is published in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Philipson.)

The Rosenbach Acquires Sully Portrait of Rebecca Gratz

A little more than a year ago, I was wishing that I could see a color reproduction of Sully's first portrait of Rebecca. The painting was in private hands and had not been exhibited since the 1920's. Starting on November 9, 2010, you can view the original portrait at the Rosenbach Museum & Library which just acquired it (along with a portrait of Rebecca's brother Joseph, by George Peter Alexander Healy) from a Gratz family descendant.

Rereading what I wrote last year about the painting (based on a black-and-white reproduction), I feel that I got it right as far as I went. Now, having seen the portrait, which has an impact much beyond that of the small color reproduction above, I am prepared to go further.

In 1820, Rebecca Gratz at thirty-nine was an "old maid." We know exactly what people thought of unmarried middle-aged women from a poem Rebecca's lost love, Samuel Ewing, wrote in his youth (long before Rebecca would end up as one). In it, he describes a withered, embittered woman, filled with envy, who still practices in front of a mirror accepting the proposal which will never come. Single women were failed women who could not get a man, their empty lives filled with longing.

It was almost impossible for an unmarried woman to escape the stereotype of this slightly ridiculous and pitiful figure, but something close to miraculous happened to Rebecca at this juncture in her life: at the end of 1819 Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe was published and within a few years the story was circulating that Rebecca Gratz was the inspiration for the character of the beautiful Jewish girl Rebecca who was a universal favorite among readers.

In 1830, when Rebecca's family wanted to have her portrait painted, it almost surely was because they wished to preserve an image of the woman thought to be the original for Rebecca in Ivanhoe. Rebecca Gratz agreed to have the painting done, but it is clear she is not sitting as the inspiration for her fictional namesake. If she were, there would have been a reference to the novel -- a volume of Ivanhoe in her hand, perhaps a misty castle or a Gothic window in the background to recall the medieval setting of the novel or some "oriental" style of clothing to connote the eastern origins of her people. (At this time, anywhere east of Italy was considered "oriental.")

No, Rebecca appears as a beautiful woman, filled with vitality and dressed in the height of fashion (an anti-old-maid). Although she never chased after her identification with Rebecca in Ivanhoe, she was probably grateful for it because it caused people to remember and circulate her story. True, she was unmarried, but not because she was a failure who could not get a man: as a young woman, she had turned down the proposal of the man she loved because he was Christian. Her renunciation was seen by both her Jewish and Christian contemporaries as an act of integrity and an admirable example of filial piety. Rebecca Gratz was not simply the raw clay from whom Scott shaped his idealized heroine, she was a heroine herself, and what we see in the portrait is a woman who has overcome suffering, found fulfillment and is very much the hero of her own life.

A few years after the portrait was painted, Rebecca wrote about her niece Sarah Moses, whom she was raising (and who would eventually inherit the painting). Touched by the girl's optimism about the life awaiting her, Rebecca believed that "I...with the memory of many sorrows and disappointments may still encourage her thus far, that if she misses the favorite path to happiness [marriage] she may find another leading to content." Rebecca's life had proved to be anything but bleak and lonely and could be a positive model for other single women.

I have a lively awareness that Rebecca associates marriage with happiness and the alternative of good works with contentment, not quite the same thing. It indicates something of what it cost her to give up Samuel Ewing and suggests a reason why she did not identify with Rebecca in Ivanhoe: the fictional character suffers with surprising serenity through Ivanhoe's marriage to Rowena; Rebecca knew what it felt like to have that kind of experience -- serenity came only after a long struggle.

The newly acquired portraits of Rebecca and Joseph join a number of Gratz family portraits at the Rosenbach, including those of her father Michael Gratz, her brother Benjamin and another portrait of Rebecca, all by Thomas Sully; portraits of her sister and brother-in -law Rachel Gratz and Solomon Moses, by Gilbert Stuart; her sister-in-law Maria Cecil Gist, by Matthew Jouett; a copy of the Sully portrait of her father, by Jane Sully Darley; and a copy of a Stuart portrait of her mother, also by Jane Sully Darley. Most, but not all, are on view. If you have questions about the paintings or about museum hours and admission, use the link above to contact the Rosenbach.

(A letter from a friend asking Rebecca if she is in fact the original of the character in Ivanhoe is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society. Ewing's poem "An Old Maid" is from The Philadelphia Souvenir, edited by John Elihu Hall (1826) and is accessible on Google Books. The letter in which Rebecca writes about her niece Sarah is from Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson, and also on Google Books.)

Sully's Second Portrait of Rebecca

Thomas Sully was still working on his first portrait of Rebecca in December 1830 when her brother Benjamin and his wife Maria arrived from Lexington KY for what would be a six-month visit. The Philadelphia family realized this would be a great opportunity to commission Sully to paint portraits of Ben, the only sibling living far from home, and his wife, who was a great favorite with her brothers- and sisters-in-law.

Ben had his portrait done in April and Maria probably about the same time. The experience and the outcome must have been good because Maria decided she wanted a portrait of Rebecca, her favorite sister-in-law and good friend, to take back to Kentucky. Rebecca complied with her wishes and sat for her portrait in May and June, 1831.

Rebecca's first portrait by Sully had been what was called a "bust," a painting which showed her from the waist up. For her second, she sat for a "head," a smaller painting like those done of Ben and Maria.

A comparison of Sully's two paintings shows the same features and coloring, but also some major differences. His first portrait is of an elegant woman of the world, one with some flesh on her bones. In the second the sophisticated woman has become angelic, and the lovely transparent collar she is wearing, which must have been an expensive item, appears, not as a symbol of luxe, but as an element which heightens the ethereal looks of the sitter.

A few years after this portrait was painted, Julia Hoffman, the daughter of Rebecca's best friend Maria Fenno Hoffman, was visiting Rebecca in Philadelphia when she wrote to one of her brothers: "Miss Gratz is in good spirits and looks quite handsomely. She is certainly one of the loveliest characters in the world. It is happiness to be with her and be loved by her and I believe we all are." To me, these words describe the image we see in this portrait.

By the way, Rebecca did love the Hoffman children. A few years later, Julia was left penniless at her father's death. Rebecca offered her a home, and Julia came to divide her time for the rest of her life between winters in Philadelphia with Rebecca and summers in the country with her brother George and his family.

(This painting is in the collection of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. In the autumn of 2010, it will travel to the new National Museum of American Jewish History fifteen blocks from the Rosenbach for a nice, long nineteenth-century-style visit. Julia Hoffman's letter from 1835 is the Fenno-Hoffman Papers in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan.)

Another blog post of possible interest is A Lost Portrait of Rebecca.

A Portrait of Miriam Gratz

In 1802 Miriam Gratz, Rebecca's mother, acceded to the requests of her children that she have her portrait painted. Rebecca went with her for her first sitting and wrote to her friend Maria Fenno about the experience. From a position "behind Stewart's chair" (that would be Gilbert Stuart she's talking about) she marveled "to see a countenance so dear to my heart appear on a board which but a few minutes before was a...piece of mahogany." She was struck by the resemblance and animation she saw in the work.

Miriam Gratz died suddenly in 1808, leaving her family in profound grief. Her husband Michael had suffered from depression for years, then sustained a stroke in 1800 from which he made a very partial recovery. He was as dependent on her as any of her children. Rebecca wrote to Maria in 1809: "We have indeed shut up our greatest treasure, the portrait of our beloved Mother, but we often visit it to weep over features too deeply graven on our hearts to require even the painter's skill to preserve. When first we were deprived of this best of parents I daily visited her picture, and felt that my only consolation was to gaze on it. But one day my father went into the room and was so overcome by looking at it, that we determined to sacrifice our wishes of having it constantly before us and close the room where it hangs."

(Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Miriam Gratz is in private hands, and I have not found a photograph of it. The Rosenbach Museum and Library has a copy of the painting by Jane Cooper Sully Darley, not currently on view. To see a reproduction of the Darley version, go to the Loeb Database of Early American Jewish Portraits on the website of the American Jewish Historical Society. The first of the two letters quoted in this post is in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress; the second from the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society.)

A Portrait of Washington Irving

I finished the previous post without sharing one of the young Washington Irving's important attributes: he was a bit of all right. How annoying it must have been for Rebecca's prospective suitors to see her obviously enjoying the company of another, and more handsome, young man.

This portrait, now in the collection of Historic Hudson Valley, Tarrytown NY, was painted in 1811 by John Wesley Jarvis. In January of that year, Irving and his friend Henry Brevoort visited Philadelphia where Rebecca reported, "They are pleased with everybody and everybody are pleased with them." Washington must have been sitting for the portrait at this time because Rebecca says that he had refused to show the painting to the Gratz family and intended to have it altered on his return to the city. By May the portrait must have been completed to his liking because it was part of a large exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Rebecca wrote to Maria Fenno Hoffman: "Tell Washington all the belles at the exhibition commended his picture....he is a great favorite." Along with "the belles," Irving liked this image of himself (as who would not): the painting hung at Sunnyside, his home in Tarrytown NY, during his lifetime.

(Rebecca's January 1811 letter is from the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society, and the one from May is from the New York Historical Society.)

A Lost Portrait of Rebecca

Almost immediately after Sully finished Rebecca's first portrait in 1830 (see the post dated Oct. 6, 2009), Hyman Gratz, her brother, commissioned another. Since the two lived under the same roof, Hyman did not need two pictures of his sister. Perhaps the second painting was to be a gift for another brother and his wife who lived in Kentucky, Benjamin and Maria Gratz.

According to Sully's records, this second painting was erased, and Fielding and Biddle, Sully's biographers, report that there was a Gratz family story that the portrait was rejected "on account of a turban or other head-dress painted in the portrait by the artist."

Now this is odd. I don't think most portraitists added something as important to a painting as headgear, without the prior consent of the sitter. So why the surprise for the woman who was after all Sully's first Philadelphia patron?

I think the answer lies in the specificity of the word "turban" in the story. Turbans had been popular with women from the 1790's on, and this particular type of head covering was not unusual in female portraits of the period. (To see some of the styles of turban then current, go to www.lynnmcmasters.com.) But for Rebecca Gratz the turban had special significance. By 1830 she was identified in the public mind with the character Rebecca in Scott's popular novel Ivanhoe. Guess what the fictional Rebecca wears in her first scene: a yellow turban.

Sully probably thought he was offering a compliment to Rebecca Gratz by recognizing her as the inspiration for the character. But the family saw that it would be taken as a symbol of her vainglory, that people would think that she dressed up like the character in the book to remind everyone (and posterity too) that she was the real Rebecca of Ivanhoe. Such a painting would have been considered to be in the worst possible taste, and it is no wonder the Gratz's wanted it destroyed.

There exist, however, two paintings by Sully -- both of women in yellow turbans -- which are usually identified as Rebecca Gratz, despite the fact that neither bears much resemblance to her. While one of them may be the "erased" painting, reworked to not look like Rebecca, Sully would have been taking a chance in reusing it: should the Gratz's have ever heard of or seen it, they would have been deeply offended.

If my theory is true, any painting of a woman in a yellow turban is not Rebecca Gratz. The two pictures are probably from among Sully's "fancy paintings," as he called his works which were not portraits.

(I am not showing the two "woman in a turban" paintings here. Images of them are available on the internet [Try searching "Rebecca Gratz" on Google Images]. The one reproduced in black and white has the face of a little girl. If you view the other painting, which is in color, you will see a woman wearing a rather silly version of a turban, one I haven't found in fashion illustrations of the era, and in a pose unlike any among Sully's many portraits. Given the fashion sense Rebecca exhibited in her previous portrait, I don't see her as a sensible woman of fifty agreeing to wear such a getup. Note also the reddish curls at the nape of the woman's neck. I found a small envelope among the Rebecca Gratz letters at the Library of Congress. On it were written her name and the date Aug. 27, 1869, the day she died. Inside were several strands of hair, raven black in color, just as it is in the authenticated portraits by Sully and all eye-witness descriptions of Rebecca.)

Sully's First Portrait of Rebecca

(For more recent news and a color reproduction of this painting, see "The Rosenbach Acquires Sully Portrait of Rebecca Gratz.") In 1830 Hyman Gratz, one of Rebecca's older brothers, commissioned Thomas Sully to paint her portrait. Many years before, in 1807, when Sully had decided to come to Philadelphia for the winter, he brought a letter of introduction to Rebecca from her friend Washington Irving in New York. In a purely social situation such a letter required the recipient to invite the bearer to dinner, introduce him to some friends and generally be helpful as he settled in. When the bearer of the letter was a man who needed work, the recipient was being asked to be his patron. Rebecca commissioned Sully to copy a miniature of her, and within the year three other Gratz relatives had had their portraits done.

Sully helped his career along by giving discounted prices to those among the first to be painted, and soon settled his wife and children in Philadelphia which would remain his home for the rest of his life. By June of 1809, he had made enough money to keep his family and send himself off to England where he would see Old Masters and study with the reigning English portraitist Thomas Lawrence. Sully returned more technically proficient and a master of the fashionable Lawrence style.

When at last Sully was offered the opportunity to paint his patroness he depicted her as a regal lady of fashion gazing pensively into the middle distance. In doing so he caught for posterity the thoughtful woman who developed and managed good works as well as the wealthy woman who loved clothes and knew how to use them to enhance her good looks.

If you compare the miniature of Rebecca in her 20's done by Malbone (see"Women's Fashions: 1800. Part 1") with this painting, you can see (especially at the jaw line) that Sully's portrait resembles Malbone's. However, Sully has come under attack for excessively flattering his first Philadelphia patron. When he painted her, Rebecca was 49, and although in the portrait she appears a mature woman rather than a girl, not many people would guess her age correctly.

My own theory about Sully is that he was both accurate and inaccurate. He was accurate enough about his sitters' features (perhaps a nip here, a tuck there, but still recognizable), but the glowing complexion he gave them (a trick he learned from Lawrence) is, let us say, not so accurate. Nearly all his sitters --men and women alike --have roses and cream skin tones which no one except a baby has in real life. We are seeing Rebecca without crow's feet, a wrinkled brow or those little lines around the mouth which are the first signs of aging. If you look at the portrait and imagine it with these marks of age, you will still see a very attractive woman, who, at 49, retains a substantial portion of her youthful beauty.

Other posts of possible interest are: A Lost Portrait of Rebecca and Sully's Second Portrait of Rebecca.

(This portrait is in private hands, and I do not know if it has ever been photographed in color. If it has, I would love to see the photo.)