What do you keep? Malbone's Mystery Unfinished Oil Portrait of Lydia Allen
Portrait of Lydia Allen, 1803 by Edward Greene Malbone (1777-1807), Oil on canvas. Bequest of Hope Brown Ives Russell, 1909.116, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, USA
Some stories take centuries to be heard. What seems like a kaleidoscope of hearsay suddenly comes together to form a clear pattern revealing a very different view into the past. For its "Unsolved Mystery" issue of January 2014, Rhode Island Monthly magazine included this unfinished oil portrait of Lydia Allen by the famous Newport-born artist Edward Greene Malbone. Curators at the RISD Museum contributed this painting to the "Unsolved Mystery" issue because it was a mystery why this 1803 portrait was unfinished and yet had been kept as a treasure by three generations of women, until it was given to the museum by the granddaughter of Lydia Allen (after Oct 1804 - Mrs. Lydia Allen Dorr).
The article quotes the curator's thinking this way:
"And why was the lower part of the painting never completed? During that time period, the surface of the painting would have been meticulously finished, with no visible brush strokes, Woolsey [the curator] says. 'The surface would have been almost mirror-like in its level of finish. A partially completed painting such as this would never have been accepted, or displayed, by the family. The fact it survived and was passed down through Allen's family to her granddaughter, who gave it to RISD in 1909, is quite unusual.'"
Further, the artist was America's most famous painter of miniatures, and this portrait is [incorrectly] described as "his only known full-scale oil on canvas painting". The RISD Museum curators thought it interesting that Lydia Allen would be the woman "that inspired him to try a full-scale painting."
The mystery led the article to speculate: "Was there unrequited love? A love affair?"
But the kaleidoscope didn't add up.
"'What is known is that the year after Malbone painted Allen's portrait, she married Sullivan Dorr, a wealthy Providence merchant [sic]. They went on to have seven children, including Thomas Wilson Dorr, who served as a Rhode Island governor. [sic] She lived to be seventy-seven, and the Sullivan Dorr House at 109 Benefit Street is a national historic landmark. … Malbone wasn't so lucky. He left Providence shortly before Allen married Dorr in 1804.[sic] He fell ill … and died … in Savannah." He was 29.
Details matter. As well as rare moments in history when other voices are given the floor to be heard. Confident or shaky as these storytellers might be.
At various times over the last decade I've wondered if this would be a research topic I should tackle as an unpaid independent historian. What could I add from my particular vantage point as a meticulous historian alert to gaps in the narrative and capable of finding the archival evidence to answer questions that should matter? Would my research shift anything? I don't know. But I still keep doing what I do best and contribute as much as I can. And so recently I read again, carefully, everything documented by Ruel Pardee Tolman, a formidable art historian and archivally-based research scholar who in 1958 published the definitive catalogue raisonne on The Life and Works of Edward Greene Malbone, 1777-1807. What did Tolman have to say about Lydia Allen and the artist? He did not draw a conclusion. What do you hear?
Tolman wrote:
"The only one of his oil portraits that might be considered an order is the unfinished one of Lydia Allen. … As far as we know, however, Malbone never offered his services as a painter of life-size portraits." (Tolman: 70)
"a large oil portrait of Miss Allen (no price given)" (Tolman: 36)
"The four Allen paintings were bequeathed in 1909 to the Rhode Island School of Design, whose Bulletin of October 1914 contains an account of them by Mr. L. Earl Rowe, the Director, intimating that Malbone had been interested romantically as well as professionally in Miss Allen, but the fact that he charged for the Allen miniatures at his usual prices for miniatures with frames would seem to scotch that story." (Tolman: 36)
But! As I will show, Malbone's did complete a very few other oil portrait as gifts to commemorate marriages within his immediate family circle. Further, Tolman's own argument does not preclude the miniatures being done as commissions during the first part of Malbone's extended stay in Providence, and the unfinished oil marking the transition to a different stage in an evolving relationship. Finally, as Tolman and I agree, Edward Greene Malbone came with the famous (even infamous) Rhode Island names of Malbone and Greene, and can hardly be written off as a lowly itinerant artist. Rather, he was already acclaimed as one of America's most brilliant painters, with the connections (and liabilities) of his Newport origins.
My current hypothesis is that the problem flows rather from his free-thinking mother, Patience Greene, who remained an unmarried Newport head of household property owner in the new Republic. She was a spinster. (Like coverture, a legal term to know about.) Spinsters comprised an entire group of resilient women in that seaport town, disrupting assumptions about women and the ways they maneuvered their own liberty before and after the Revolutionary War. (Consider that Patience Greene's son and future artist son, Edward, was born during the traumatic British Occupation of Newport which lasted from late 1776 until October 1779.) Much more to learn about this situation, but Patience Greene's children were not legally "illegitimate" because the father, John Malbone (1735-1795), recognized them in his will - although this is a separate story in itself. (John Malbone is the son of Godfrey Malbone, Sr. an infamous figure in Newport history and once one of the wealthiest men in colonial Newport who famously finished his dinner while watching his mansion burn to the ground.)
For now, be aware of the nuance in the Early Republic around the separate class of spinster - an unmarried woman, possibly with children, and different from the derogatory way we use the term today. Among other things, it was one path to avoid coverture so that women could keep their own inherited property and inheritances as unmarried women. Although clearly there were social costs a woman paid for this freedom.
Let me conclude this "backstory" blog on the evidence that intrigued me enough to keep this project on my mind. I quote at length here Tolman's catalog entry on Lydia Allen:
“[3] Allen, Lydia (1784-?), the daughter of Zachariah and Ann Crawford Allen. Of the seven portraits Malbone is known to have painted during his four-month stay in Providence, Aug.-Nov. 1803 three (two miniature and one oil) are of Lydia and one is of her mother. L. Earle Rowe, in Rhode Island School of Design Bulletin, October 1914, said that Lydia was "a lady who interested Malbone very much but who married Sullivan Dorr instead." Indeed, the artist was so preoccupied during this four-month Providence episode, that he neglected to record an estimated $350 of expenses in his Account Book (12-3). Lydia's marriage took place not long after Malbone's departure, for her son, Thomas Wilson Dorr (1805-1854), was born Nov. 5, 1805. [Dorr became the leading figure in the so-called "Dorr's Rebellion" of 1842, after his election as governor under the new "suffrage" constitution while Samuel W. King held the office under the Old Charter. When Governor Dorr attempted to organize the government on May 3, 1842, Governor King ordered the militia against him and was successful. Dorr fled to Connecticut and later to New Hampshire, returned in 1844, was tried for treason and sentenced to imprisonment for life. He was released under the Amnesty Act of 1845 and restored to citizenship in 1851.]"
Malbone's work with Lydia Allen is dated 1803, Providence, Rhode Island.
Clearly, there is more to this story. I would also note Tolman's inability to provide Lydia Allen with a death date, an unusual lack of follow through for this detail-oriented meticulous researcher.
Here's an action item: Let's see if Lydia Allen's portrait can get moved to a different location within the RISD Museum, with a label that provides more context. I think she's spent enough time in a domestic environment, not to mention a bedroom.
It is my working assumption that this unfinished oil on canvas portrait of 21-year old Lydia Allen from 1803, after her father died in 1801 and before she was married in 1804, is all about the progressive promise implied by Malbone's most famous miniature, The Hours with the hopeful figure of the "Coming Hour" manifest in her idealized face. This was a promise that the young Lydia Allen believed for a brief year was within her reach. This portrait spoke of a future that could include self-determination over her body and property, as she dreamed of a life of liberty. Lydia had just inherited the homestead lot of Roger Williams! Rhode Island’s founder who believed deeply in liberty of conscious, or what he called Soul Liberty. But this remains an unfinished portrait.
To be continued.
