Background
Bass Otis was the son of Dr. Josiah and Susanna (Orr) Otis, and a descendant of John Otis who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1630 or 1631 and settled in Hingham. He was born on July 17, 1784, in Bridgewater, Massachussets.
Bass Otis was the son of Dr. Josiah and Susanna (Orr) Otis, and a descendant of John Otis who emigrated to Massachusetts in 1630 or 1631 and settled in Hingham. He was born on July 17, 1784, in Bridgewater, Massachussets.
At an early age Bass Otis is said to have been apprenticed to a scythe-maker in his native town. He received his first instructions in painting by working for a coach painter, evidently after having completed his apprenticeship in the implement factory.
By the time Bass Otis first appeared in New York, in 1808, he had established a reputation as a painter of portraits. In 1812 he went to Philadelphia and set up a studio. He signalized his arrival in the city by sending eight portraits to the Second Annual Exhibition of the Columbian Society of Artists, in May 1812, which was the first display of his work. To the 1813 Exhibition he contributed among others, a portrait of himself. He painted portraits of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Joseph Hopkinson, Commodore Truxtun, Charles Thomson, and Dr. Caspar Wistar for Delaplaine's Repository of the Lives and Portraits of Distinguished American Characters, between 1815 and 1818, but only one of these portraits was engraved, that of Jefferson, because the work did not go beyond the first two volumes. The Jefferson portrait was painted from life.
For several years Otis appears to have been kept busy copying portraits for Delaplaine, painting many more than those noted above, and annually sending his work to the exhibitions of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. To the exhibition of 1819, Otis sent the only composition he is known to have painted. This was entitled, "Interior of an Iron Foundry, " and is understood to have pictured the place where he served his apprenticeship. The painting was favorably received, and the artist presented it to the Academy. In 1815 he invented the perspective protractor, but this contrivance seems to have attracted little attention, although commended by several artists.
He was noted for painting portraits of deceased persons, sketching them in their coffins, and giving them a life-like character on his canvas. One of the distinguished examples of this work was his portrait of Stephen Girard, which he copied at least once, and which is apparently the only likeness of the "mariner and merchant. "
A year before his death Otis painted a portrait of himself for Ferdinand J. Dreer, of Philadelphia, an antiquary, which was reproduced in the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (1913).
Otis' chief claim to fame lies in the fact that he made the first lithograph in America. This has been identified by the writer as the portrait of the Rev. Abner Kneeland, affixed to the volume of his lectures, published in 1818. The plate bears the inscription, "Bass Otis, Sc. ," and does not resemble the familiar lithograph, because in Otis' ignorance of the art, he merely etched the stone in a combination of lithotint, stipple, and line, methods not intended to be used in combination. That the plate is a lithograph has been denied by Frank Weitenkampf , who claims that it was executed on copper. Joseph Pennell, however, who was an expert lithographer, expressed himself to the writer as satisfied that it was a print from a stone. Otis made in precisely the same manner a lithograph which appeared in the Analectic Magazine, for July 1819, but he limited his method to expression in line. It was an etching on stone, contrary to the design and purpose of lithography, which is intended for surface and not for intaglio printing. The lithograph in the Analectic has always been cited as the first American lithograph, although the magazine that contained it did not claim for it that distinction.
In 1845, Bass Otis left Philadelphia and opened a studio in New York. Five years later he was painting portraits in Boston but in 1859 he returned to Philadelphia. There he later died and was buried beside his wife and children in Christ Church Burial Ground.
Quotes from others about the person
Dunlap did not think highly of Otis' work, declaring that his portraits were "all of a class; if not so originally, he made them so, " although he admitted that Otis had "strong natural talents, and a good perception of character. "
Otis was married, in 1819, to Alice Pierie of Philadelphia.