Lot 290: RALPH EARL (1751-1801), 1794

A Pair of Portraits: The Reverend and Mrs. Abraham Beach
Each inscribed 'R. Earl Pinxt 1794'
oil on canvas (2)

Descended in the family of Abraham Beach
Georgina Betts Wells
Thence by descent to the current owner

VARIOUS PROPERTIES

Abraham Beach was born in Cheshire, Connecticut, the son of Captain Elnathan Beach and Hannah Wooster, the sister of General David Wooster. A brilliant young man, Abraham entered Yale College at the young age of 13, graduating three years later in 1757. During the French and Indian War, he was a provision supplier with the army. In 1764, he became a communicant of the Episcopal Church and began his studies to become ordained, later traveling to England in 1764 for his ordination. Soon after, he was appointed as a missionary to New Brunswick and Piscataqua in the Province of New Jersey, arriving there in 1767; during his first few years in New Jersey, he and a five other men founded Queens College, which later became Rutgers University and which still has his Anglican Prayer Book. Beach remained in New Brunswick and was the only clergyman in New Jersey to keep his church open during the war. In 1770 or 1771, he married Anne Van Winckle, his ward, in Raritan, New Jersey.
Among the foremost painters of early Republican America, Ralph Earl (1751-1801) was one of several American artists whose native talent inspired the means to study abroad, and whose academic English training provided the expertise to portray his countrymen in the most internationally fashionable manner of the time. As much as his artistic abilities enabled Earl to support himself abroad, it was also his political sympathies that required his departure from America in 1778. He refused to serve the rebel cause and his name is included on the Loyalist Claim of 1778 and he was shortly thereafter charged with being a spy. Upon arriving in England, he painted with Benjamin West and exhibited at the Royal Academy. He returned to America in 1785.

Earl became well acquainted with members of the Episcopal Church, primarily in the few years between 1786 and 1788 when he was in a New York debtor's prison. A humanitarian group, the Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors, was comprised of members of the Episcopalian Church, as well as members of the Society of the Cincinnati; Earl profited greatly from their efforts and several members commissioned works from him, even while he was in prison. After his release, Earl moved to Connecticut, where he painted for the next ten years. Given the distance between Connecticut and New Jersey, it is likely that Earl's contacts within the Episcopal Church may have helped bring about the execution of these portraits.

Earl's manner and style of depicting his sitters changed with his evolution as an artist and adaptation to his patrons' wishes. His early portraits are characterized by a stark simplicity, a boldness of color and tonal contrast that is similar to that of Copley. Those portraits painted while in England and after his return to America are defined by simultaneous informality and loose fluidity, particularly in the depiction of background scenery, suggesting the influence of such English artists as Arthur Devis and Thomas Gainsborough. (Betsy Kornhauser, Ralph Earl, The Face of the Young Republic, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 1991, p. 10)

These portraits of the Reverend Abraham Beach (1740-1828) and his wife, Anne (1757-1808) are stylistically linked to a pair of portraits Earl painted of Mr. and Mrs. Jared Lane in 1796 and a second pair of portraits, these of Judge and Mrs. Judson Canfield, also in 1796, all illustrated in Ralph Earl, The Face of the Young Republic, (Kornhauser, cat. nos. 51-52 and p. 209). The half or two-thirds representation of the sitters, all placed inside with a partial landscape in the background and the gentlemen with props that make reference to their personal interests or professions are characteristic of Earl's work.