Museum accessions

Magazine Antiques, June, 2005 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

Born in Boston in 1759 to a British customs officer stationed there, Isaac Coffin joined the Royal Navy in 1773, rising to the rank of admiral by 1814 and along the way, in 1804, being created a baronet. Despite his lifelong allegiance to England, Coffin had strong ties to Massachusetts, specifically to the island of Nantucket, where his ancestor Tristram Coffin had been one of the first settlers and where the admiral himself established the Coffin School in 1826. Originally intended to train young men to become sailors, the Coffin School continued to educate Nantucket children through the twentieth century, and the building today houses the Egan Institute of Maritime Studies. The portrait of Coffin illustrated above, painted in Boston by the celebrated American artist Gilbert Stuart, has recently been acquired by the Nantucket Historical Association. Considered one of the most important works by Stuart to come on the market in recent years, the painting descended through the family of one of Coffin's cousins. It was painted after 1808, the year Coffin became a vice admiral, for the three rows of lace on his sleeve and two stars on his epaulets denote that rank. Carrie Rebora Barratt, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and a cocurator of the recent Gilbert Stuart exhibition (on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., until July 31), has pointed out that the portrait is painted on the type of scored panel that Stuart preferred during his years in Boston, which enhanced his fluid technique and virtuosity, allowing him here to capture the noble and amiable character of his sitter.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In 1834 Captain Robert Bennet Forbes, a prosperous Boston China trader and art patron, gave one of his dories to the English painter Robert Salmon in partial payment for four marine paintings based on the long dramatic poem The Shipwreck, by the eighteenth-century Scottish poet William Falconer. In the same year Forbes moved his mother and sisters into the stately house he had just built for them in nearby Milton, Massachusetts, overlooking Boston Harbor, from which his ships sailed to the Far East. Four generations of the family lived in the house until it was turned into the Museum of the American China Trade in the 1960s, and ultimately the Captain Forbes House Museum in 1984. Recently, the Salmon paintings were donated to the museum by Florence Cushing Perkins, having descended through her family over some 170 years. Illustrated below is Moonlight, the second in the series, which shows a ship departing from the island of Crete. A thorough discussion of the poem and the paintings may be found in Robert F. Perkins Jr. and William J. Gavin III's article "Robert Salmon's paintings from William Falconer's poem The Shipwreck," which appeared in this magazine in December 1980 (pp. 1226-1231).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

When the eighteenth-century silver kettle-on-stand illustrated at lower right was offered at auction last year it was thought to have a direct connection to William Tryon, the royal governor of North Carolina, who built what is known today as Tryon Palace in New Bern as the capitol building and governor's residence. Tryon Palace Historic Sites and Gardens snapped up the kettle at the sale, delighted to have such an important and beautiful piece of its history. Alas, while the kettle-on-stand fits perfectly in the palace's stately Georgian interiors, curators there have discovered that it may never have belonged to Tryon, certainly that there is no direct line of descent. The earliest documentary evidence of the kettle in New Bern records is a letter of 1876 from a Miss Curtis of New Bern, stating that her father had purchased it about fifty years earlier. By 1886 it was considered to be one of "sundry relics of the Palace and Tryon," according to History of the Presbyterian Church in New Bern, N.C., by the Reverend Lachlan Cumming Vass, but no documentation for the statement was offered. The kettle was made in London by Peter Archambo I and is datemarked for 1727; engraved on the front are the arms of Newton impaling those of Allen, but the significance of the arms has not yet been discovered. It is hoped that further research will help cement the history of this wonderful piece.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]