A charming unsigned portrait of a young woman, simply described as early nineteenth-century Anglo-American, was recently offered for sale at an online auction (Fig. 1).1 Researching such early American art from the 1790s into the 1840s, which we prefer to call Federal American vernacular portraits, presents many challenges.2 The paintings are rarely signed and most of the artists have fallen into complete obscurity. We successfully purchased the portrait and decided that, stylistically, it should be attributed to Samuel Broadbent from Wethersfield, Connecticut, who was, most unusually, both a physician and a portrait painter.
The only previous publication about Broadbent’s life and art was by William Lamson Warren (1912–1998) in the October 1973 issue of the Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin.3 Even though none of the oil-on-canvas portraits illustrated was signed, they were clearly by the same artist, whose identity had been determined based on family tradition and the portraits recorded in Romanta Woodruff’s 1819 diary entry: “Doc’t Samuel Broadbent here taking my likeness” (Figs. 2, 3).4 This attribution was met with some skepticism at the time, as the exhibition also included a small watercolor portrait (Fig. 5) signed by Broadbent that was difficult to correlate with the oil-on-canvas examples.
The earliest reference to Broadbent that Warren found was a January 1798 newspaper advertisement announcing his arrival and medical practice to the citizens of Wethersfield (Fig. 4). Although Broadbent published several advertisements for his medical practice, his training was questioned by Warren since during the period of Broadbent’s life anyone could call himself a doctor, he was not remembered as a physician in the Wethersfield town histories, and he was never a member of the statewide physicians’ society. Portrait painting was not mentioned in his advertisements.5
We began looking for information about Broadbent by examining our own files of early American portrait painters. Accumulated over forty years, they now include the names and images of portraits by over two hundred artists who painted in America soon after Independence. In the Broadbent folder, we found a forgotten note we had written to ourselves several years earlier: the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, had purchased a manuscript account book that included some pages filled in by a Samuel Broadbent.6 Could this be Samuel Broadbent the portrait painter? The library’s online catalogue states that multiple portraits were listed, but we found that the account book had not previously been used to further document the artist. We quickly visited the library.
This account book is a large ledger with the first two-thirds, dated from 1770 to 1796, filled in by Samuel Foster, a Wethersfield merchant who died in 1797. Broadbent apparently acquired the ledger with the last third of the pages unused. Starting in 1798, he meticulously maintained his medical accounts for each family by recording the date, treatment, drugs provided, and his fee in English currency. Initially, a family’s records were listed on the left page and the right page was used to detail their payments. This was soon found to require too much space and the records became haphazardly entered wherever there was a blank area. The account book’s organization and jumbled entries made it necessary for us to reenter the information into a searchable computer spreadsheet for further analysis.
We learned that between 1798 and 1800, Broadbent’s first years in Wethersfield, there was an initial rush of 146 families who became his patients. Most families were from Wethersfield and 34 percent of the patients were treated at his office, which he recorded as “at present.” The medical care of several members in a family was often described. While 218 family accounts were recorded during the fourteen years covered by the account book, the number of new patients quickly diminished after the initial surge, with few added after 1805. The accounts were added to until approximately 1811, when the book became completely filled.
The account book shows Broadbent’s high level of medical training and the details of a physician’s practice. For example, teeth were pulled for one shilling and babies delivered, recorded as a “foetus extraction,” for eighteen shillings. As early medical education was taught in Latin, Broadbent filled his records with the abbreviated Latin names of drugs. We had to decipher these names using several medical formulary texts published at this time in England and America, which also described the often complex and laborious manufacture of drugs from a wide variety of herbs, chemicals, and minerals, as well as their possible medical applications. Broadbent’s patients were provided with at least fourteen different pills, seven different drugs to induce vomiting, and six different poultices to draw substances out of the body. His most commonly prescribed drugs were amaranth, made from the pigweed plant, which was believed to relieve diarrhea and inflammation; laudanum, which is opium dissolved in alcohol, for pain; and alum, which has antiseptic properties, reduces coughing, and de-worms. Because of the risk of infection, little surgery was done, except for the draining of cysts and fluids. Major wounds were closed with sutures, and, in one case, insect larvae were added to remove dead tissue.
Broadbent’s portrait commissions were entered into his account book as just another charge mingled in with the detailed family medical records (Fig. 9). The sitters were his patients, and only once in the account book is there an entry for just portraits. There would have been little need to sign the paintings, given the familiarity that exists between patients and their physician. Twenty-four portraits were recorded altogether. The earliest was of Benjamin Adams, who, in June 1803, was charged three English pounds for his portrait and then two shillings, six pence for “Painting moulding & wheels of carriage” (Fig. 11). The combined cost of the portrait and carriage painting, as well as his medical treatment, was paid for with “a cradle and 21 [pounds] of rye flour with bag.” Most painting commissions were for a pair of standard-sized husband and wife oil-on-canvas portraits priced at six English pounds, which was quite expensive. Samuel Foster’s entries at the beginning of the account book show that in Wethersfield, during the early 1790s, six English pounds purchased eight acres of meadow land or two cows. Portraits were rarely painted in other than the standard size or at lower prices and, at least twice, charges were entered for altering a portrait. Unusual entries included “repairing two cases of wax-work” and painting objects such as signs. Payments were received in cash and goods such as sugar, rum, flour, cider, and tea, and in many types of services such as hauling wood and horse rental. At this time, the town of Wethersfield was famous for growing red onions, a trading commodity that Broadbent regularly accepted as payment.
Broadbent’s paintings are examples of what we call the Federal American vernacular portrait style with its simplified forms, romantic expressions, minimal perspective, and unmistakable directness (Figs. 6–8, 10, 12, 13). The focus is the sitter’s face, which is illuminated by an appealing rich, warm light that, oddly, never forms a shadow. The sitter is presented at the edge of the picture plane, ready to step into the viewer’s world and with an intense direct eye contact that further enhances the idea of a personal encounter. The rest of the portrait blends together in a restrained palette, with the figure before a curtain or an empty background that has little geometry and perspective to compete for attention. Occasionally, the portraits show an arresting use of color. Wherever these portraits are hung, the sitter is also present in the room. It is difficult for us today, in our world so full of images, to understand what these portraits represented, as they enshrined loved ones in life-sized images. To Broadbent’s clients, these were completely new and highly personal objects that also represented the height of sophistication and technical ability.
A few other contemporary artists, such as Samuel Shute and Elias V. Coe, also combined the professions of physician and portrait painter. This union of occupations made practical sense. The techniques used in the preparation of drugs were very similar to those used to prepare the required artists’ materials, such as extracting pigments from many sources and paint production. In addition to perfecting the skills required to prepare the needed supplies, artists had to develop a second level of mastery by understanding the aesthetics of art and design and the techniques of drawing and painting. Portrait painting was a difficult and time-consuming enterprise, but it was also one of the most expensive commodities that Broadbent offered for sale.
Our next major trip researching Broadbent was to the Connecticut Museum of Culture and History (formerly the Connecticut Historical Society) in Hartford. Two items in the museum’s library held great surprises for us. First were two loose medical account-book pages tucked for safe-keeping into the end flyleaf of Broadbent’s daughter Rowena’s 1828–1844 friendship album.7 The pages were from Sag Harbor on Long Island, New York, and listed four families’ medical accounts from 1794 to 1796. Although Broadbent’s name does not appear on the pages and no portraits were described, we immediately recognized his hand-writing, accounting organization, and abbreviated Latin names of the usual drugs. We were delighted to tell the librarian that these pages were from an unknown Samuel Broadbent account book. We confirmed that Broadbent had lived in Sag Harbor after finding a local May 1797 advertisement for English medicines he was selling.8
The second item discovered at the Connecticut Museum was equally astonishing. After Warren’s article was published in 1973, the museum received an account of Broadbent’s genealogy handwritten by Jared Butler Standish (1866–1961), a respected Wethersfield historian and genealogist.9 It provides both a reason and a timetable for Broadbent’s journey from England to America. He was born on March 29, 1759, and married a woman named Susanna, born, according to the genealogy, in 1758. Their first child, John Wait Broadbent, born in London on October 2, 1783, was a normal healthy boy. A second son, George, was also born in London, on August 14, 1785, but died at a year old. A third son, Thomas, was born in 1787 and quickly died. As a physician, Broadbent would have been acutely aware of the high infant mortality that occurred in densely populated London, so the family moved across England to rural Westmorland County. However, the personal tragedies continued. Their fourth child, Mary, died shortly after birth in 1790 and, between December 1792 and January 1793, both a fifth infant, Samuel, and Broadbent’s wife died.
It was evidently important to the Broadbents that their children were received into their Anglican faith. After the death of the second son, succeeding babies were quickly baptized with their age recorded as zero months. We can all empathize with the sorrow that this family endured. While these deaths more than two centuries ago at first appear mysterious, our scientific background immediately suggested a cause. We are all familiar with the four human blood groups (A, B, AB, and O) and the plus or minus presence of the Rh factor. The pattern of infant mortality in the Broadbent family is typical of Rh blood–factor incompatibility, which occurs with a Rh-negative mother and a Rh-positive father. The first baby is usually normal. However, that baby’s Rh-positive blood inherited from the father results in an immune response in the Rh-negative mother that greatly affects further pregnancies. The second child dies soon after birth, and death quickly takes all subsequent babies. Today, medical intervention can control this immunological problem.
A desire to leave this turmoil behind is understandable. By January 1794, at age thirty-four, Broadbent had immigrated to America. He restarted his medical practice in Sag Harbor and, by 1798, moved just across Long Island Sound and up the Connecticut River to prosperous Wethersfield. This relocation may have been a response to the opportunity created by the death of the town’s prominent physician, Dr. Josiah Hart, in 1796.
We continued our search for additional examples of Broadbent’s portraits and received a most unexpected response. The Wethersfield Historical Society informed us that they had a third account book, which continues from 1812 to Broadbent’s death in 1828.10 Much to our surprise, we had now found three libraries that had each independently preserved a portion of his account records. Together, they represent all the years Broadbent was in America.
Additionally, the Wethersfield librarian asked if we were aware of the gossip about Broadbent. In Wethersfield, he boarded at the Griswold family mansion, which was the home of Josiah (1771–1802) and Abigail Harris Griswold (1773–1874). When Josiah died at the age of thirty-two, Abigail was left a wealthy widow with three young children. She and Broadbent began a relationship that resulted in two out-of-wedlock children, Alfred and Albro, both of whom were given the Griswold surname, although it was apparently common knowledge that Broadbent was the father.11 This would have been seen as highly scandalous and may have been the reason why Broadbent’s account book shows so few new families becoming patients after the birth of the first child in 1805. Abigail and Broadbent did marry in 1808 and had two additional children, Samuel Jr. (1811–1880) and Rowena (1813–1897), who were both trained as artists by their father. One does not want to cast aspersions, but the death of Josiah Griswold was a highly fortunate circumstance for Broadbent. He became the beneficiary of a family fortune that completely altered the remainder of his life.
The third account book shows a greatly reduced medical practice. While patients were still being seen, the medical records were intermingled with other expenses and wages paid, haphazardly recorded in dollars. Only eight portraits, in a range of sizes and prices, were described, along with various other artworks. For example, in February 1819 he charged Temperance Hill, whom he employed as household help, for “a likeness of herself $2.00” as well as for “a mourning piece with drawing $1.50.”
Broadbent’s accounting also shows that he was treating patients with some of the latest medical advances, including vaccination against smallpox with the less virulent cowpox, and using electricity. In 1818 he paid a Mr. Lorey for “expenses in erecting my electrical machine.” According to contemporary descriptions, electricity was understood to be a fluid and was not used to shock, but, at a lower voltage, produced sensations that overpowered the pain from a wide variety of conditions. Broadbent would spend three days at a patient’s home using the electrical machine for $6.00 and then rented it to the patient at fifty cents per week. In 1827, the year before his death, Broadbent was still practicing medicine and delivering babies. He recorded charging Prudence Butler “To fix a seton on thigh” to drain a cyst and “Consulting with Drs. Woodward and Beldon in Operating . . . $1.00.”
The local church records list Broadbent’s death on April 2, 1828, at age sixty-nine as due to gangrene, while a less complimentary, unidentified diarist described him as a “Foreigner from England . . . [who died from] Dropsy [swelling probably from heart disease] & high living.”12 Even though Broadbent had lived in Wethersfield for thirty years, his “high living” achieved by marrying a rich widow was pointedly remembered.
We can present the story of Samuel Broadbent thanks to the account records and other documents that were carefully preserved by three separate cultural organizations. While he arrived in America as a practicing physician, as an artist he did not bring the mannerism of the English academic portrait style, full of atmosphere and perspective that created a grand expression of an upper-class sitter. Several American artists who studied in England and then returned to America, such as John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, and Ralph Earl, prominently painted in this style. Instead, Broadbent embraced the Federal American vernacular portrait with its personal directness, simplified depiction, and a clarifying romantic presentation. He adopted this uniquely American style and quickly made it his own.13 Samuel Broadbent provides a rare, detailed picture of both the physician and portrait painter in early America.
This article presents a preliminary description of the new information about the life and art of Samuel Broadbent. A detailed further analysis will be published by the authors.
1 “Summer Americana Online,” Bonhams-Skinner, Marlborough, Massachusetts, August 14, 2023, Lot 1171. 2 Suzanne Rudnick Payne and Michael R. Payne, “Making Faces: Federal American Vernacular Portraits,” The Magazine ANTIQUES, July/August 2023, pp. 112–123. 3 William Lamson Warren, “Doctor Samuel Broadbent (1759–1828) Itinerant Limner,” Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, vol. 38, no. 4 (October 1973), pp. 97–128. The article served as the catalogue for the society’s 1973 exhibition of Broadbent’s work. 4 Quoted ibid., pp. 101–102. 5 A problem in researching Broadbent is that his history is poorly documented and, even today, some sources state that he was born in Hartford, Connecticut, while his newspaper advertisements clearly announce that he was a physician from London. 6 “Samuel Broadbent: account book, 1769–1815,” Mss. Folio Vols. B, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts. 7 “Rowena Broadbent friendship album, 1828–1844,” MS 75579, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History, Hartford. 8 Frothingham’s Long Island Herald (Sag Harbor, New York), May 31, 1797, p. 4. 9 Jared Butler Standish, “Broadbent family genealogical file,” Gen. Ms. Broadbent, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. This genealogy is the most reliable description of Samuel Broadbent’s family that has been located. We have confirmed many of the events described in it. 10 “Samuel Broadbent, Dr. (1759–1828) Journal Accounts of Medical Doctor and Artist, Wethersfield 1811–1828,” Wethersfield Historical Society, Connecticut. 11 [Writer’s name blotted out] to Jared Butler Standish, January 3, 1956, Broadbent Genealogy, Standish Collection, Wethersfield Historical Society. This letter discusses that the two out-of-wedlock children had no claim to a Griswold ancestry. 12 “Records of the First Church in Wethersfield from the year 1774,” Wethersfield Historical Society. Author unknown, “Record of Deaths in Wethersfield 1828–1839,” MS 65093, p. 1, Connecticut Museum of Culture and History. 13 Fifty-nine portraits by Broadbent are either listed in the account books or are currently attributed to him by the authors. He produced portraits in oils, pastels, watercolor, and pencil. All are unsigned, except for the watercolor portrait of Samuel Blin (Fig. 5). In contrast to his father, Samuel Broadbent Jr. (1811–1880), who was primarily a daguerreotypist and painter of portrait miniatures, often signed his works.
MICHAEL R. PAYNE and SUZANNE RUDNICK PAYNE are collectors and members of the American Folk Art Society. This is the twenty-third article they have published about early American folk art.
