John Wood Dodge: and the portrait miniature

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003 by Raymond White, D.

Limning, wrote Nicholas Hilliard (c. 15471619) about 1600, "is sweet and cleanly to usse and it is a thing apart from all other Painting or drawing and tendeth not to common mens use. (1) John Wood Dodge, an uncommon man, used limning well, and the portrait miniatures he painted were indeed sweet in nature and clean in style and execution.

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Dodge was born into a middle-class family in New York City on November 4, 1807. (2) At about the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a sign painter in whose shop his work included painting tinned cans. Dodge, his fellow workers, and his family quickly recognized that he had considerable artistic ability and encouraged him to develop his talent. Dodge seems to have taught himself, first by copying borrowed paintings and then, during the winter of 1826-1827, by drawing from casts and statuary in the collection of the National Academy of Design in New York City. (3)

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He quickly found portrait miniatures on ivory to be his metier, and his progress in the field was remarkable. By 1828 he was painting reasonably competent portraits; in 1829 he first exhibited at the National Academy of Design; and in 1832 he was elected an associate of the academy. (4) In the early 1830s William Dunlap wrote that Dodge "stands among the prominent professors of the art [of painting portrait miniatures] in New York." (5)

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Portrait miniatures were not made to be hung on a wall, to be gawked at by the merely curious, as were large portraits. In virtually every case the miniature was painted to be given as a bond between the subject and the recipient. Dodge began to work in the midst of a major change in the technique, and, some feel, in the meaning of portrait miniatures. In the mid-eighteenth century these paintings were small, and the emphasis was on delicate coloring and flattering likenesses. As the century ended, the miniature grew larger (generally 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 inches high), coloration became bolder, backgrounds tended to be darker, and likenesses became more realistic.

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Dodge's miniatures are in the larger size, they tend to have the bolder coloring, and his normal background is relatively dark. However, the pink cloud background that he sometimes used has a delicacy that would have pleased an eighteenth-century miniaturist. His work was almost always meant to have the quality of a personal token, rather than that of an object for public display.

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In addition to being an artist of fine sensibility, Dodge was also a craftsman, and he obviously had vowed early in his career never to be guilty of poor workmanship. With a few exceptions, his portraits, all carefully and smoothly painted, fall into two types. The first type is painted from just off center, usually with the subject looking slightly to the right, and with a greenish-gray background that varies from light to moderately dark. Virtually every one of these has a shadowlike smudge at the lower right. The second type has a background of pink-tinted clouds and sometimes includes furnishings, a landscape, or architectural features, as well as different poses.

Dodge practiced successfully in New York City until the late 1830s, when his health appeared to be deteriorating and his doctor gave him the common prescription of moving to the South. In 1838 Dodge traveled to Huntsville, Alabama, where, after a somewhat slow start, he had a successful season of painting. (6) After the season he returned to New York, but was back in Huntsville the next year. One of the portraits he painted during that trip was of a handsome young man named David Peter Lewis (Pl. V) who paid seventy-five dollars for the portrait. (7) Lewis gave the portrait to a Nashville belle, Narcissa Pillow Saunders (c. 1840-1913), as part of his suit for her hand in marriage. (8) Miss Saunders is said to have "received more offers of marriage from men of prominence in the United States and foreign countries than was ever accorded to another of the sex. (9) She had to have been as good at refusing them as she was at attracting them, and she used this skill to turn down David Lewis's suit five times, it is said. (10) Lewis went on to a successful career as an attorney and served as the governor of Alabama from 1872 to 1874. Neither he nor Narcissa Saunders ever married. (11) Her family fortune was a victim of the Civil War, and she died in poverty in Nashville in 1913. Another example of Dodge's work in Huntsville is the painting of Colonel Elija Rice shown in Plate XI.

Although business had been good in Huntsville, Dodge concluded there was no long-term future there because the city was too small. (12) By May 1840 he had moved to Nashville, (13) and from the beginning he enjoyed a successful stay in Tennessee. Nashville newspapers not only carried advertisements announcing his arrival, but also published articles praising his work and recommending him highly. (14) Perhaps his most remarkable client was the estate of Robert Woods, a prominent and wealthy Nashville banker. Woods left instructions in his will that twenty-four miniatures of him (see Pl. III) be painted--one for each of his twenty-four nieces--and Dodge got the contract. (15) It took him about six months to do the work, and he charged $940 for the pictures without cases.