Gilbert Stuart??: No, James S. Hathaway! (And his surprising career)
The few known facts about James S. Hathaway began with his arrival on Nantucket in 1839. A letter published that year describes him as “a young and promising artist”, implying he was early in his career
He came at the perfect time. The economy was recovering from the Panic of 1837, and Joseph Swain, the established portrait artist on Nantucket, would soon be leaving to study abroad for two years.
Image Courtesy the Nantucket Historical Association
Around July 1840, Hathaway completed his portrait of Mary Hussy Gardner. We can see Hathaway’s talent, particularly in the rendering of Mary’s warm expression. We can also see his lack of formal training. His faces have been compared to those of a porcelain doll, and his hands are disproportionately small. In spite of this, Hathaway received commissions from several prominent families.
Image Courtesy the Nantucket Historical Association
Hathaway was popular for several reasons, First, he painted children, whom Swain generally avoided. Second, his style captured an idealized representation of his sitters, sometimes arrayed in a formal tableau. Hathaway moved to Boston around 1845 but returned for the “summer seasons”. Several of his works are now displayed at the Nantucket Whaling Museum.
Image Courtesy the Nantucket Atheneum
In March 1846, Hathaway donated his George Washington portrait to the Nantucket Atheneum, helping it rebuild after the disastrous fire of the previous year. A newspaper article said the work had been praised in Boston as an exceptional copy. It exhibits a better understanding of anatomy, suggesting Hathaway had studied with an established artist.
The newspaper article noted that Hathaway hoped to travel to Europe for a two-year sojourn. However, there was no confirmed record of his being in Europe and just scattered hints of a possible later career in Boston.
Compounding the problem, Hathaway didn’t always sign his paintings, and even some of his identified Nantucket works could only be dated from the bills he submitted to his patrons.
The 1980’s saw renewed interest in American Folk Artists, and a wave of research into artists working on Nantucket. Though they raised the possibility James Hathaway was from southeastern Massachusetts, the consensus of his whereabouts after 1850 remained “uncertain”.
Then, in 2021, James S. Hathaway was found.
In March 1854: Henry Clapp Jr, a Nantucket native active in New York’s literary circles, had just returned from Europe and was giving a series of lectures at the Nantucket Atheneum entitled “Paris as it is.”. A previously overlooked article in the April 10th 1854 Nantucket Inquirer included this passage:
“… Mr. Clapp made the following allusion to the highly gifted American artist, which was listened to by his numerous friends in Nantucket with great pleasure…“Among other persons whom I met in Paris was our old artist-friend Hathaway, many of whose striking portraits adorn your own rooms. He was at work in the Louvre putting the finishing touch to a splendid copy of a painting by Rapphael[sic], He has won himself the reputation of being one of the best copyists in Paris, and is equally successful in painting original portraits….”
Today, ”copyist” is usually an insult; in the 1850’s it was a respected and well-paid career. If we live in a media-saturated world of rich full color images, information in the mid-19th Century was confined to paper and largely black and white. Color printing existed and was increasingly used for handbills and posters, but it was still too primitive to render a realistic copy of a painting. Meanwhile, the growing middle class fueled demand for better reproductions. To fill the gap, skilled artists manually painted copies of the desired originals. Sometimes the “copyist” was the original artist, (Gilbert Stuart produced over a hundred copies from his original George Washington portraits), and reproduction rights – manual and mechanical – were routinely negotiated during the commission process.
As with Nantucket a decade before, Hathaway arrived in Paris at a good moment. After a politically volatile decade, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte mounted a coup in 1851 and declared himself Emperor of France. To reinforce his regime, the government immediately commissioned copies of official portraits, as well as religious art and other masterpieces, to be distributed across the country.
As might be expected, there was intense demand for copies of the masterpieces in the Louvre collection. Students were given some latitude, but the Louvre Museum tightly controlled commercial reproductions. All copyists had to register and receive permission to paint and remove their work. Even with these restrictions, copyists filled the galleries, leaving almost no room for visitors.
Image Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum
Although Henry Clapp Jr. sometimes enhanced his stories, Louvre records confirm “James S. Hathaway” first registered as a copyist on March 1, 1849, listing his address as “38 r. de Lille”. While he moved several times, Hathaway continued to register with the Louvre until 1864.
Image Courtesy the Louvre Museum
With Hathaway’s presence in Europe confirmed, we recently pinpointed his likely departure date from America to August 1848, when he sailed from Boston to Liverpool.
In addition to the Raphael mentioned by Clapp, Hathaway received permission to copy a Spanish Baroque work at the Louvre by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo. We can’t be certain, but it was likely his “La Sainte Famille, dite aussi La Vierge de Séville”, (1665-1670), a far cry from Hathaway’s austere Nantucket portraits.
Image Courtesy the Louvre Museum
Hathaway may have worked at the Louvre past 1864, but later records are fragmentary. He probably left Paris by 1871, when France went to war with Prussia and was soundly defeated. Paris was put under siege and suffered badly. Louis Bonaparte was deposed, and the new government sharply reduced commissions for painted copies.
Though Hathaway was in Europe for at least fifteen years, no work has been attributed to him, nor was he ever listed in any of the Salon exhibitions.
In many ways this absence from the record is unsurprising. Henry Clapp Jr. likely exaggerated Hathaway’s success for the benefit of his “hometown” audience, so the number of completed works is relatively small. And many were probably lost in the intervening century and a half marked by three wars.
Hathaway’s lack of training at an official academy may have hindered acceptance to sanctioned juried Exhibitions, while (paradoxically), his traditional style kept him from the unofficial shows of the avant-garde.
Two other explanations are less obvious: His copies were deemed a success to the extent they emulated the style of the original artist. Second, as Hathaway’s technical skills improved, his original portraits could have lost the “naive” features that characterized his earlier work. There could be a Hathaway in plain sight without our realizing it.
For now, all we can say is that James S. Hathaway’s copy of George Washington marks a transition in his career, from a promising “American Period” of original portraiture to a longer and mature “European Period”, possibly grounded in once respectable but now defunct vocation.
More Information:
- During his life, Henry Clapp Jr. journeyed far from his Nantucket Quaker roots. He was an early promoter of both Mark Twain and Walt Whitman and was not only a member of New York’s “bohemian” demi-monde but is credited with bringing the word to America. The Nantucket Atheneum Podcast presented a three-episode series about his life and times.
