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Adam Babcock
John Singleton Copleyc. 1774
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Washington, DC, United States
Details
- Title: Adam Babcock
- Creator: John Singleton Copley
- Date Created: c. 1774
- Physical Dimensions: overall: 117 x 91.7 cm (46 1/16 x 36 1/8 in.) framed: 132.4 x 107 cm (52 1/8 x 42 1/8 in.)
- Provenance: Edwin A. Blake [1847-1928], the sitter's great-grandson;[1] sold 1916 to (Macbeth Galleries, New York);[2] purchased 1917 by Alice Greenwood Chapman, Milwaukee [1853-1935];[3] repurchased by (Macbeth Gallery, New York); sold 25 February 1919 to Arthur Meeker [1866-1946], Chicago.[4] Fannie Morris Babcock Murray [Mrs. Henry Alexander Murray, 1858-1940], New York; her son, Dr. Henry A. Murray, Cambridge, MA [1893-1988]; gift 1978 to NGA. [1] Stephen Babcock, _Babcock Genealogy_, New York, 1903: 219; Wilkins Updike, _A History of the Episcopal Church in Narragansett, Rhode Island_, 2nd ed., Boston, 1907: 2: v; on Blake see the _Journal of the Eightieth Session of the New York East Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church_, Bridgeport, Connecticut, 1928: 665-667. [2] Macbeth Gallery Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, correspondence with Arthur Meeker, 16 January 1919. See also "Copley Portraits Sold," _The New York Times_ (30 December 1916). [3] Macbeth Gallery Papers, Archives of American Art, Washington, correspondence with Miss Chapman, 14 January to 19 June 1917. Miss Chapman made a first payment on the portrait and that of Mrs. Babcock [NGA 1985.20.1] in January 1917, but by June she had changed her mind about the purchase. She wrote on 7 June, "I am too overcome by the outcome of the war to be indulging in such luxuries...I have just given an ambulance to the Wisconsin Ambulance Co." On Miss Chapman, a Milwaukee art patron and collector, see the Milwaukee _Journal_ for 27 April 1935 (obituary) and 12 May 1935. [4] Meeker, vice-president of Armour & Co. and a collector of American art, is listed in _Who Was Who in America_ 2 (1943-1950, fourth printing 1946), 23. His obituary is in _The New York Times_ (6 February 1946): 23. Although he offered to sell the portraits back to Macbeth in June 1925, there is no record in the Macbeth Gallery papers that they were repurchased (Macbeth Gallery Papers, Archives of American Art, Correspondence). [5] Babcock 1903, 520; obituary, _The New York Times_ (3 June 1940): 15; Mrs. Murray was a descendant of the sitter's brother Henry Babcock. According to Barbara Neville Parker and Anne Bolling Wheeler, _John Singleton Copley, American Portraits_, Boston, 1938: 30, she acquired the portrait about 1930. [6] On Murray see Ronald Turner, ed., _Thinkers of the Twentieth Century_, 2nd ed., Chicago and London, 1987: 560-561; obituary, _The New York Times_ (24 June 1988), reprinted in _The New York Times Biographical Service_ 19, no. 6 (June 1988): 746. Adrian Lamb painted a copy of this portrait in 1979 for the Murrays.
- Rights: CC0
- Medium: oil on canvas
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