Thomas Bangs Thorpe (American/Louisiana, 1815-1878), "Portrait of a Gentleman from Jackson, Louisiana", 1839, oil on canvas, signed, dated and inscribed "Jackson, LA" en verso, 30 in. x 25 in., framed. Note: Thomas Bangs Thorpe (also spelled “Thorp”) moved to Louisiana in 1837. Originally from Massachusetts, he attended Wesleyan University and exhibited promising artistic and literary talents, however health concerns would prevent him from graduating. He was advised to seek a warmer climate, thus spurring his move to the South where he eventually landed in Baton Rouge. Thorpe worked to establish himself as portrait and still life painter in New Orleans before heading upriver in 1839 to the towns of Jackson and St. Francisville in Louisiana. He befriended local planters, including Bennet H. Barrow (1811-1854) of Highland Plantation, and observed with a keen, analytical eye the daily life of those around him. While a northerner was generally looked upon with bemused skepticism, Thorpe’s easygoing and charming manners earned him invitation into local society, resulting in portrait commissions.In 1839, the same year as the date of the portrait offered here, Thorpe’s sketch story of a beloved local character “Tom Owen, The Bee Hunter” was published in the New York Spirit of the Times. The story was so well received that it was republished in many different markets both national and international and included in several mid-century anthologies of American literature such as Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s Prose Writers of America and George and Ever Duyckinck’s Cyclopaedia of American Literature. The publication of “Tom Owen” launched Thorpe’s career as a writer and subsequent works such as “The Big Bear of Arkansas” placed him in the same league as other southern humorists such as Mark Twain. According to his biographer, Milton Rickels, “[The Big Bear of Arkansas] became so well known that Bernard DeVoto has called the body of literature which followed it the Big Bear School of Southern humorists.” His tone, always warm, jovial and bitingly precise, accurately conveyed his admiration for his newfound home from the eyes of a frank, yet respectful, outsider.Thorpe’s body of oil paintings proves incredibly difficult to study. While he relied mostly on his painting income while living in St. Francisville, there are not many known examples of his portraiture remaining. Additionally, he shifted his creative focus from painting to writing and editing for the Concordia Intelligencer in Vidalia, Louisiana in 1843 and would later pursue politics. Notably, no portrait by Thorpe has come to auction in at least twenty years, and most which have been recorded in local art history and portraiture books have been listed as unsigned and “attributed to” as is the case with The National Society of Colonial Dames’ Louisiana Portraits and Martin and Margaret Wiesendanger’s Louisiana Painters and Painting from the Collection of W. E. Groves. The painting offered in this lot is rare in that it is signed, dated “1839” and located “Jackson, La” en verso. The focus is a distinguished gentleman, dressed in fashionable period garb, with a thick black cravat and suit and crisp white shirt reminiscent of the contemporaneous famed portrait of Valcour Aime by Jacques Amans. He casts a gaze on the viewer that is stern and discerning. Rickels recounts in his biography that Thorpe did paint the family members of his aforementioned friend, Bennet Barrow, but there are not many other mentions of other potential subjects. While there were a finite number of planters and eligible sitters in East and West Feliciana Parish at the time, the mysterious gentleman in this portrait remains unidentified.Ref.: Milton, Rickels. Thomas Bangs Thrope, Humorist of the Old Southwest. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1962; “Thomas B. Thorpe”. Britannica. www.britannica.com. Accessed May 25, 2021

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