Jeremiah Dummer was born on September 14, 1645, at Newbury, Massachusetts. He was the son of Richard Dummer and his wife, Frances, widow of Reverend Jonathan Burr. Richard Dummer, said to have been a native of Bishopstoke, England, settled at Newbury and later at Boston, and in 1635-36 was one of the Governor's Assistants.
Dummer had dealings with John Hull, mint master, in whose shop he placed Jeremiah as apprentice. Hull wrote in his diary, "16t of 5th [1659] I received into my house Jeremie Dummer and Samuel Paddy, to serve me as apprentices eight years. The Lord make me faithful in discharge of this new trust committed to me. "
Having learned John Hull's trade, Dummer set up his own shop and, tall, erect, thin-visaged, a typical Puritan of aristocratic bearing, he entered upon his career as a useful and high-minded citizen of Boston.
He joined in 1671 the Artillery Company, in which he held offices, but in 1686 when the Massachusetts militia was reorganized he was one of four captains who were not reappointed. His civic services began when he was made constable in 1675.
Dummer was a selectman of Boston, 1691-92; justice of the peace, 1693-1718; treasurer of Suffolk County, 1701; overseer of the poor, 1702. He was of the commission appointed in 1700 by the Earl of Bellomont to visit Gardiner's Island in search of treasure supposed to have been hidden there by Capt. William Kidd. Dummer saw his second son, Jeremiah, Jr. , started in an honorable legal career in England, and he sat a proud man in his pew on September 27, 1716 (as recorded by his first cousin Samuel Sewall) while Mr. Pemberton preached a sermon congratulating another son, William Dummer, upon becoming lieutenant-governor and acting governor of the province.
In his social and business relationships he seems to have been fortunate. He died after a long illness. Appreciation of Dummer's exquisite workmanship in silver has been revived in the twentieth century by successive exhibitions of colonial silver at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in whose permanent collections he is well represented. His shop produced some of the finest ecclesiastical and convivial pieces of the period. He also engraved money for Connecticut.
In 1921 Frank W. Bayley discovered inscriptions in Dummer's handwriting on portraits of himself and his wife, which suggest that he may have been the earliest native portrait-painter of the English colonies. These likenesses, owned during several generations by descendants of Samuel Dummer of Wilmington, Massachussets, Jeremiah's eldest son, had previously been attributed to Sir Godfrey Kneller. The backs of the canvases, however, bear these inscriptions in a hand tallying with many Jeremiah Dummer signatures preserved at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Although no autobiographical or contemporary reference to Dummer's practice of the limner's profession has to date (1930) been found it is plausible and even probable that so clever a craftsman, perhaps having seen some itinerant painter at work, learned to do passable likenesses, such as these are. Likenesses of John Coney, silversmith, and his wife, who was Mrs. Dummer's sister, were discovered in 1929 to bear Dummer's signature, and several unsigned portraits in New England may well have come from his hand.
The Boston News-Letter of June 2, 1718, commended Dummer as "having served his country faithfully in several public stations, and obtained of all that knew him the character of a just, virtuous, and pious man. "
Dummer was married in 1672 to Anna, daughter of Joshua Atwater, merchant, later prominent at New Haven, Connecticut.
