This commanding portrait was made by the Boston-born artist Mather Brown in 1790. Painted in London, the portrait depicts the lawyer and legal scholar John Reeves whilst he was negotiating a commercial treaty with representatives from the new United States and shortly before his appointment as chief judge, later first Chief Justice of Newfoundland. Brown came from a long-established Massachusetts family he was named for his maternal ancestor the Reverend Increase Mather who had served as the sixth President of Harvard College. Trained initially in Boston, he spent time in London in the studio of Benjamin West before establishing himself as a successful painter in London. Brown was supported by a stream of commissions from visiting Americans, painting in 1786 the earliest portrait of Thomas Jefferson who had recently arrived in Paris to take up his post as the American Ambassador to France. Jefferson in turn, commissioned Brown to paint a portrait of John Adams, then serving as the American Ambassador to Britain. In 1787 Reeves had been appointed legal counsel to the Board of Trade and was serving as a law clerk for the Board’s American Department directly advising on the commercial treaty John Adams was attempting to secure on behalf of the new nation.
Mather Brown is the least well known and least celebrated of the pioneering generation of American painters who followed Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley. Brown was born in Boston to a well-connected Massachusetts family, his grandfather, Mather Byles was a leading Congregational minister in the city. Following the death of his mother Elizabeth, Brown’s father Gawan, married the widow of Joseph Adams, the brother of Samuel Adams, founder of the Sons of Liberty and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Brown knew Copley as a child – Copley had painted both Brown’s mother and grandfather – but it was Gilbert Stuart who Brown would claim ‘was the first person…who learnt me to draw at about 12 Years of age at Boston.’ As Dorinda Evans has pointed out, Stuart made a short visit to Boston in 1774 expecting to profit from Copley’s recent departure for London. Brown can, therefore, have only received very informal instruction from Stuart. Brown followed the American army to Philadelphia, hoping to make money as a miniaturist, returning to Boston in 1778 where he met John Trumbull who had recently taken the lease on the studio of John Smibert, filled with Smibert’s pioneering contents of copies after European old masters, engravings and plaster casts. Trumbull himself gave a summation of the artistic situation in Boston: ‘Mr Copley was gone to Europe, and there remained in Boston no artist from whom I could gain oral instruction; but these copies supplied the place, and I made some progress.’[1] In this way, Brown and Trumbull gained a rudimentary training.
Gilbert Stuart
John Singleton Copley
Oil on canvas
26 ½ x 22 ¼ inches; 673 x 565 mm
Painted c. 1784
NPG 2143
© National Portrait Gallery, London
All this took place against a backdrop of the Revolutionary War and Brown found himself pulled between the competing parties in Boston, his Tory grandfather was a loyalist, whilst his father’s marriage placed him at the heart of the Revolution and his older half-brothers all fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill on the American side. Probably as a consequence of the war, Brown decided to try his luck in Europe. He arrived in Paris in 1781, where he was entertained by the American Ambassador, Benjamin Franklin who presented him at Versailles as the ‘Grand Son to one of his most particular friends in America.’ Franklin, in turn, furnished Brown with a passport to Britain and letter of introduction to ‘the famous Mr West.’
Benjamin West ran a hugely productive and successful studio in London, which became a mecca for young American painters. Brown clearly spent some time with West, exhibiting his first painting at the Royal Academy in 1782, giving West’s studio in Newman Street as his address. Brown rapidly established a successful portrait practice attracting members of the expatriate American community and British aristocratic and society figures. In the Spring of 1786 Thomas Jefferson, the newly appointed American Ambassador to France, arrived in London to discuss details of the treaty he and John Adams were empowered to negotiate with Britain. Jefferson sat to Brown for his portrait, his account book recording that Brown was paid £10 on April 25th, 1786, the day before his departure for France. Adams was so pleased with the likeness, he requested a copy. Jefferson’s portrait is now lost, but the replica Brown made for Adams survives and is preserved in the National Portrait Gallery, Washington. Later in 1786 Thomas Jefferson wrote from Paris to Colonel William Stephens Smith, who had recently married the young Abigail Adams, asking him to arrange for Brown to paint John Adams from life. Jefferson explained ‘I wish to add it to those of other principal American characters which I have or shall have: and I had rather it should be original than a copy.’ Jefferson already had a portrait of George Washington by the American artist Joseph Wright and two busts, one of John Paul Jones and another possibly of Benjamin Franklin, by Jean-Antoine Houdon. The following year Jefferson commissioned Brown to complete a portrait of Thomas Paine, the famous promoter of American independence. Jefferson was still waiting for his portrait of Adams in 1787 writing again to Smith to urge Adams to sit: ‘as I should be much mortified should I not get it done before [Adams] leaves Europe.’ Finished in 1788, Brown’s portrait of Adams is now in the collection of the Boston Athenaeum. Jefferson repeatedly expressed his preference for Brown as a portraitist to the exclusion of other American artists, including his friend and correspondent John Trumbull.
Mather Brown
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Oil on canvas
35 ¾ × 28 ½ inches; 908 × 724 mm
Painted 1786
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; bequest of Charles Francis Adams
NPG.99.66
Mather Brown
John Adams
Oil on canvas
35 ½ x 28 1/16 inches; 902 x 713 mm
Painted 1788
Boston Athenaeum
Brown’s portrait of John Reeves is similar in approach, palette and handling to his portrait of Jefferson. Brown shows the British lawyer seated in a severe black coat, with white stock and his own powdered hair. Reeves was a barrister and legal academic, born in London, he was educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford. Called to the bar in 1779, Reeves was appointed a commissioner in bankruptcy. Reeves was most famous for his legal scholarship publishing his important History of English Law in 1783-4. Reeves rejected an institutional categorisation of English law in favour of a historical approach. It was a hugely influential text across the Atlantic world, both Jefferson and David Hoffman recommended it, including it on the reading lists of American law students during the first quarter of the nineteenth century.[2] John Reeves was legal counsel to the Board of Trade serving as a law clerk for the Board’s American Department during their negotiations with Adams. It is likely he would have been aware of Brown’s portraits of Jefferson and Adams.
Reeves spent much of his career involved with North America. In 1791, a year after this portrait was completed, he was appointed chief judge of the Newfoundland court. The following year he was made chief justice of Newfoundland publishing his History of the Government of the Island of Newfoundland in 1793. In 1803 Reeves became Superintendent of the Alien Office, a department of the Home Office founded to control the influx of French refugees into Britian. In 1814 Reeves explored the question of whether Americans born before the War of Independence retained their English citizenship, Reeves concluded that they did noting: ‘Mr Jefferson might have the benefit of his American citizenship in perfect compatibility with the claims upon him from British allegiance.’[3]
Brown’s portrait shows Reeves at the outset of his career. Painted with remarkably fluency, Brown shows his indebtedness to the works of Gilbert Stuart in the plasticity and volume he manages to impart to his sitter. Throughout, Brown uses a virtuosic range of paint effects, with passages of highlight achieved using sweeping impasto, whilst Reeves’s hair is suggested with a mass of dry, broken brushstrokes. The paint surface remains in exceptional condition and the canvas unlined. This state of preservation reflects the painting’s history, having been preserved in the family of the sitter until 2025.
References
- Dorinda Evans, Mather Brown: Early American Artist in England, Middletown, 1982, p.12.
- Morris L. Cohen, ‘Thomas Jefferson Recommends a Course of Law Study’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, number 119, 1971, p.832; and David Hoffman, A Course of Legal Study Addressed to Students and the Profession Generally, Baltimore, 1836, vol.1, p.162.
- John Reeves, Two Tracts Shewing, That Americans, Born Before the Independence, are by the law of England not aliens, London, 1816, p.16.