Ralph Earl was an American painter known for his portraits, of which at least 183 can be documented. He also painted six landscapes, including a panorama display of Niagara Falls.
Background
Born on May 11, 1751, in Worcester County, Massachusetts, Earl was the oldest of four children of Ralph and Phebe Whittemore Earl (variously spelled Earll, Earle, and Earl). His parents lived on a substantial farm in a section of Leicester that is now part of Paxton; their two-story house still stands.
Education
As a boy, Ralph received some schooling in Leicester. While in England, Earl plied his trade in the provinces, studied in London with Benjamin West, and exhibited at the Royal Academy.
Career
His career can be divided into three periods: an early phase, from which just a handful of attributed and lost works are known; seven years in England during and just after the American Revolution; and sixteen final highly productive years in America. In England, his drawing improved considerably, his compositions became more complex, and his use of color became more sophisticated. He also experimented in England with different formats and introduced landscapes and complex interiors into the backgrounds of his portraits. These would become signature features of his later American work.
The final period of his life included three years’ residence in New York City and thirteen years as a traveling artist in Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, and Vermont. The artist’s brother, son, and nephew Augustus Earl were all artists. His life story — colored by his loyalty to the British Crown during the Revolution, two overlapping marriages, more than a year in debtors — prison, and a death hastened by alcoholism—reads like one of the morality tale-novels written during the period.
For most of the two years, as Earl strove to establish himself as an artist in New Haven, Connecticut, he and his wife lived apart. An advertisement that ran in three issues of the town’s newspaper during July 1774 lists "JOHN EARLL, PORTRAITE PAINTER… He paints landscapes, coats of arms on the lowest terms." Whether this was Ralph Earl, incorrectly identified, or a relative whose presence drew the Massachusetts native to Connecticut for guidance has been a matter of debate. In either case, Earl’s earliest known surviving portraits, including the full-length Roger Sherman, were painted in New Haven. Although somewhat awkwardly drawn, this likeness demonstrates Earl’s lifelong interest in strong light and shadow and close attention to detail as well as his ability to capture the particular character of his sitter.
In New Haven at about this time, he met the painter Henry Pelham, who was the half-brother of John Singleton Copley. On a visit to Pelham in Boston in March 1775, Earl saw the works of both artists. His improved efforts to convey texture and modeling in his paintings from that time forward have led him to be compared to Copley. Indeed, Earl noted the connection himself, claiming, for example, that he had "received the last and finishing strokes of his art from the hands of the immortal Reynolds, West and Copley."
The fact that Earl, who was loyal to the Crown, could be commissioned to portray an important patriot such as Sherman at the moment when the American Revolution was erupting suggests that life in that time and place was especially complex. This complexity is further illustrated by a nearly contemporaneous episode in the artist’s life. Earl’s father refused a commission in the British Army, instead earning a captaincy in the local militia. Ralph Earl, however, refused to serve and narrowly escaped prison for taking that stance as well as for his unwillingness to pay taxes in support of the American uprising.
Yet at the same time, Earl probably created preparatory drawings for four prints depicting the Battle of Lexington and Concord that propagandized on behalf of the Revolution. These engravings were executed by Amos Doolittle and first advertised for sale in New Haven on December 13, 1775 — a month before Earl was named for leaving the colony without paying taxes. This printmaking project is significant not only because the resulting engravings express political beliefs diametrically opposed to Earl’s own position but also because they reflect Earl’s early interest in creating specific landscape views. Later, landscape would figure importantly in his portraits and would serve as the subject of other works.
Earl’s wife joined him in New Haven in November 1776, and they lived there until May 1777. Because of his Loyalist sympathies, the artist came under increasing pressure to leave his adopted city. In April 1777 Earl and several other men had been characterized in the Connecticut Journal as being "friends of George the third and would not take up arms against him or his troops." Their behavior was further described as a "glaring instance of treason", and a petition signed by fifty people demanded that action against them be taken. Earl eluded punishment with the assistance of General John Burgoyne’s quartermaster general, John Money, who "had the goodness to disguise him as a Servant and bring him from Providence to Newport in a Flag of Truce and from thence to England where they arrived in April last [1778]." Sarah was not included in this ruse and remained behind.
In London, Earl applied for financial relief to the Lords Commissioners of the Treasury, claiming that he had assisted the British Army by providing intelligence that prevented it from being attacked on Long Island in March 1777. Earl wrote the commissioners that because of his convictions he had sacrificed his right to his father’s estate and that his father’s rank in the colonial militia had enabled him to escape death. These efforts were not fruitful, and Earl would eventually have to earn his living in England as a painter.
John Money was the first of several important patrons Earl found in England. He brought the young artist to his home at Trowse Hall, near Norwich. In this provincial arena Earl found customers for portraits, presumably helped by introductions from Money.
Earl’s first surviving signed and dated portraits, “William Carpenter” and “Mary Ann Carpenter (Mrs. Thompson Forster)” were painted in 1779 in Aldeby, about a dozen miles from Money’s home. Earl’s movements in England have not been fully traced, but by 1783 he had a London address, Hatton Garden, as listed in the catalogue for that year’s Royal Academy exhibition, the first in which he participated. Two paintings, both exhibited under the generic title “Portrait of a Gentleman” (1783), were included. By 1783, too, Earl had established contacts in Windsor, where he painted several portraits of girls who were attending a private school there.
In Windsor, Earl was encouraged and instructed by Benjamin West, the expatriate friend to several generations of American painters who spent time in England. His artistic growth during this period appears to have stemmed from West’s teachings as well as from exposure to Grand Manner portraiture and to the London academic-art world. For the art historians William and Susan Sawitzky, his English period reflects equally the influence of West and George Romney. West, the Sawitzkys proposed, showed Earl how to improve his draftsmanship and modeling; and Romney, they contended, helped him develop new ideas about "posture, color, grace, and simplicity of handling." Earl’s clients in England included Dr. Joseph Trumbull, an apothecary from Worcester County, whose half-length portrait of 1784 conveys the sitter’s confidence and handsome appearance as well as Earl’s increasingly relaxed brushstrokes.
The large sporting picture “Portrait of a Man with a Gun”, signed and dated 1784, probably was produced amid this flurry of activity; it might be the "large picture" Earl refers to in his letter. As noted, he admired Copley and, anticipating his return to America, announced himself as a "scholar of Copley, West, and Sir Joshua Reynolds." In the Royal Academy’s 1784 exhibition catalogue, Earl’s address is given as Leicester Fields. This would have placed him near both Reynolds and Copley. To date, however, no one has substantiated a teacher-student relationship between Earl and either of those artists.
Earl returned to America in 1785, two years after the formal end of the Revolutionary War. He attempted to establish a studio business in New York City, painting portraits of the fashionable elite. However, he hit substantial impediments and eventually had to pursue an itinerant practice among a clientele composed primarily of the rural gentry.
He landed in Boston in May along with his new wife, Ann, his friend Joseph Trumbull, and a new patron, the ship’s captain John Callahan. He paused briefly in Boston before proceeding to New York by way of Providence and New London, in both of which places he painted portraits. Arriving in New York in late October, Earl advertised his intent to "enter upon his profession in this City, where a specimen of his abilities may be seen on calling at Mr. Rivington’s, No. 1, Queen-Street."
Despite some early successes and the birth of a daughter, Mary Ann, and a son, Ralph E. W., the artist became embroiled in a series of lawsuits that led him to be incarcerated in debtors’ prison from September 1786 to January 1788. Curiously, the very New York officials charged with enforcing the debtors’ laws — including the mayor, the trial recorder, and the sheriff — became patrons who ordered portraits in an effort to gain Earl the income necessary to earn his freedom. Many of these officials, and other patrons, were organizers of a reform movement aimed at ending a law that punished indebtedness by taking away one’s ability to earn a living.
His time in jail proved to be one of Earl’s most productive phases, during which he created sophisticated studio portraits such as Mrs. Alexander Hamilton (Elizabeth Schuyler). This half-length likeness conveys the grace and beauty of his sitter and demonstrates the fluid handling of paint that he had mastered in England. Because of limits imposed by his imprisonment, Earl’s portraits from this period include stock elements, such as the drapery and upholstered chair in the Mrs. Hamilton portrait, rather than the specific furnishings and landscapes for which he is now best known.
Earl was freed in January 1788, and, once more, the support of one individual became central to his livelihood for a sustained period. That patron was Dr. Mason Fitch Cogswell, a Connecticut native practicing medicine in New York, who over time introduced Earl to approximately three dozen patrons in that city as well as in Fairfield, Greenfield Hill, Hartford, Litchfield, Middletown, New Milford, Norwich, and Stamford — all in Connecticut. These communities would in turn become the source of Earl’s itinerant business for the remaining years of his life. In Litchfield, located in the center of the northwestern county of the same name, Earl practiced his profession with particular success.
The most prominent and generous of Earl’s Litchfield County patrons were the Boardmans and the Taylors, two New Milford families related by marriage. Together, they commissioned at least fourteen portraits and one landscape. The most impressive among these works are the full-length, life-sized “Daniel Boardman” and “Elijah Boardman” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), both done in 1789. These paintings show Earl at the height of his talent. The elder brother, Daniel, is cast as a gentleman landowner. Leaning against a walking stick, he stands outdoors with a view of a mansion house and of New Milford in the distance. Elijah, on the other hand, is portrayed as a learned merchant. He is posed inside his shop with bolts of fabric neatly arrayed on shelves behind him, while the desk he leans against is lined with volumes by the likes of Shakespeare, Milton, and Samuel Johnson. Earl demonstrates the crisp drawing and modeling of the human figure that characterized his earlier career, while the landscape behind Daniel Boardman exemplifies the more painterly approach that he developed in England.
Earl’s practice now kept him perpetually on the move in Connecticut, on Long Island, and, later, in Vermont and Massachusetts. Account books of such patrons as Jared Lane of New Milford provide rare documentary evidence of the artist’s business practices, showing that at least some sitters paid not only for the paintings but also for Earl’s materials and room and board. Yet the fact that he was moved to advertise, at least once, that the "price for a Portrait of full length is Sixty Dollars, the smaller size Thirty Dollars; the Painter finding his own support and materials" shows he could not count on such accommodations. The difficulties of this itinerant life were no doubt accentuated by the fact that Earl was traveling with his wife and their two young children. By 1798, the strains involved led Ann and the children to move to Troy, New York, where the Earls’ friends and Litchfield patrons David and Rachael Buell also settled that year.
During his last decade, Earl not only painted landscape backgrounds as components of portraits but also completed at least six full landscapes, including an ambitious panorama of Niagara Falls. Typically, Earl’s smaller landscapes — such as those ordered by the Boardmans, Canfields, and Lanes in Litchfield County and the Deweys in Bennington, Vermont — were adjuncts to portrait commissions. Yet one of his most ambitious landscapes, “Looking East from Denny Hill”, painted in 1800 for Colonel Thomas Denny in Leicester, had no known accompanying portrait. It combines such picturesque elements as a broadly brushed rose-hued sky and two framing trees enclosing a sweeping, detailed view of the Denny farm. Even though Colonel Denny does not appear in the painting, it nonetheless emphasizes his identity as the wealthiest landowner in the area and a leading figure in local civic life.
Toward the end of his life, Earl trained at least two young artists. Earl’s legacy was more directly carried on by his son Ralph E. W., who became a successful portraitist best known for his long-standing relationship with Andrew Jackson. The younger Earl painted Jackson’s portrait many times and married the seventh president’s niece.
Ralph Earl died in Bolton, Connecticut, on August 16, 1801. The local minister recorded the cause of death of the fifty-year-old artist as "intemperance." The uneven quality of Earl’s last portraits suggests that his health had been failing for several years. His obituary in the Hartford newspaper described him as "a Portrait Painter, celebrated in America and respected in Europe, a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and a member of the Royal Society."
Portrait of Clarissa Seymour (later Mrs. Truman Marsh)
1789
Portrait of Elijah Boardman
1789
Portrait of Esther Boardman in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
1789
Portrait of Oliver and Abigail Ellsworth in the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
Politics
Although Earl’s father was a colonel in the Continental army, Earl was a loyalist.
Membership
He was elected a member of the Royal academy in London.
Personality
He seems to have been a man of unstable temperament. William Dunlap's history of American art published in 1834 observed that Earl "prevented improvement and destroyed himself by habitual intemperance."
Connections
In 1770 or 1771, Ralph Earl met Sarah Gates, who was his second cousin. When the couple married, in September or October 1774, Sarah was already several months pregnant; the first of their two children, Phebe, was born the following January. A son, John, was born in May 1777. It was in Norwich that he met Ann Whiteside, who became his second wife in 1784 or 1785 — this despite the fact that he never formally ended his marriage with Sarah.