Salem, Massachusetts, circa 1810
Oil on canvas, 22 x 29 inches, formerly put on a smaller stretcher, relined with in-painting to areas of paint loss
A rare double portrait by John Brewster, Jr. (1766-1854), this likeness of baby twins Josiah Coffin Dow (1809-1833) and Richard Weare Dow (1809-1840) can be reliably dated to circa 1810 given the age of the sitters. On May 4 of that year, John Brewster, Jr. advertised in the Salem Gazette, as did the sitters’ father, Josiah Dow (1783-1850) for his business of selling imported fabrics (Salem Gazette, 4 May 2010, pp. 1, 3). No doubt Josiah perused this newspaper and may have commissioned this portrait as a result of seeing Brewster’s advertisement. Both twins died at relatively young ages, Josiah at the age of 24 and Richard at the age of 31 in a widely reported tragedy of the burning of the steamer Lexington in Long Island Sound.
The portrait descended to their younger brother, George Worthington Dow (1811-1884) and then directly in the family until its sale at auction in 1981.
Published:
“A Look at the Auctions,” Antiques and the Arts Weekly, November 27, 1981, p. 48.
Lita Solis-Cohen, “Doyle’s Americana Sale,” Maine Antique Digest, January 1982, p. 10-A.
Harlan Lane, A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster, Jr. (Boston, 2004), unpaginated inventory of works. Paul S. D’Ambrosio, The World of John Brewster, Jr. (New York, 2006), pl. 28.
Recorded:
Peter Goodman, Notebook, no. 744.
Exhibited:
“A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr.,” Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, New York, April 1-December 31, 2005, traveled to The American Folk Art Museum, New York, October 4, 2006-January 2007.
Provenance:
The sitters; to their brother George Worthington Dow (1811-1884), Boston and Salem, MA, Wakefield, NH, and Brooklyn, NY;
to his son Abbott Low Dow (1845-1914), New York, Derby, CT and Wakefield, NH;
to his daughter Cornelia Herriman (Dow) Bancroft (1872-1960), Brooklyn, Boston and Saint Petersburg, FL;
probably to her son Charles Foster Bancroft (1906-1982), Boston, New Canaan, CT and York, ME;
“Americana,” Doyle Galleries, New York, November 18. 1981, lot 108; Collection of Peter and Barbara Goodman, Rye, NY;
“The Collection of Peter and Barbara Goodman,” Christies, New York, January 20, 2022, lot 159
