Artist: Robert Feke Place/date of birth: Oyster Bay, New York ca. 1707 Place/date of death: Barbados (?) ca. 1752 Title of work: Grizzell Eastwick Apthorp Date of completion: 1748 Materials: Oil on canvas Dimensions: 49 5/8 x 39 3/4 inches Signed with initials, dated and inscribed lower right : RF Pinx /1748 Collection: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Accession number: 1979.7.42 Introduction By 1748, when Robert Feke painted this work, Boston had become the principal port of North America and the largest town in the colonies. Grizzell Eastwick Apthorp was one of Feke's most celebrated works. Grizzell Eastwick was born in Jamaica and moved to Boston where in 1726 she married Charles Apthorp, an English-born merchant who was paymaster and commissary for the British troops quartered in Boston. Apthorp used his position to become the greatest and most noted merchant on this continent, according to the obituary published in the Newsletter of King's Chapel, Boston on November 16, 1758. The couple had eighteen children, fifteen of whom survived their father. Grizzell Apthorp as well survived her husband by almost forty years. Discussion After 1700, the population in the American colonies increased and the accompanying prosperity led to the expansion of urban life. A growing class of wealthy merchants and shipowners with a taste for a more gracious way of life supported the importation and local production of luxury goods. Academically trained painters began to emigrate from Europe, bringing with them knowledge of contemporary court styles as well as prints and painted copies of European paintings. American-born artists often based their portraits on these European models. Looking Closely Grizzell Apthorp's features are rendered in a flat, rather unexciting manner. In contrast, the artist has lavished great attention on her clothing and accessories in order to inform the viewer of her elevated social standing. In this portrait, Feke has Grizzell Apthorp look up from John Milton's Paradise Lost. The page is open to the lines in book nine where Eve has just told Adam that she has tasted the fruit of the tree of knowledge and has asked that he too eat of it. Speechless and pale, Adam thinks to himself: O Fairest of Creation, last and best Adam will shortly follow Eve in eating the forbidden fruit and lose Eden for all humankind. By focusing on lines in the poem that glorify women, the artist clearly means to associate Grizzell Apthorp with the attractive qualities in Eve that Adam found so compelling. The artist's specific reference to this passage from Paradise Lost, combines a Puritan reflection on the perilous state of the human soul with one of English literature's strongest expressions of marital devotion. Style Although little is known about the artist, it is clear that he was familiar with the tradition of formal elegance in portraits by the eighteenth century French and English court painters. Engravings of European paintings were widely available in the colonies and were a chief source of information on European art for American artists until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Copying European art styles was an accepted practice by which artists could demonstrate their awareness of the trends and techniques used abroad. Grizzell Apthorp's pose, the classical column, gathered drapery, and the domesticated landscape are all conventions borrowed from published prints of European nobility. Artist Although Robert Feke was one of the most talented American-born portrait painters of the eighteenth century, details of his life remain largely unknown. From 1741 to 1751 Feke worked as a portrait painter primarily in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia. Approximately sixty paintings by Feke exist to date. Links to American History Curriculum
SLIDE 4
GRIZZELL EASTWICK APTHORP
Of all God's Works, Creature in whom excel'd
Whatever can to sight or thought be form'd,
Holy, divine, good, amiable or sweet!
...with thee
Certain my resolution is to Die;
How can I live without thee, how forgo
Thy sweet converse and Love so dearly join'd,
To live again in these wild Woods forlorn?
...no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine shall never be parted, bliss or woe.
Introduction | One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Slide List | Museum Visit