Mr. Fowell Cuts |
During the years 1796 to 1801, John Brewster Jr. painted the portraits of Colonel and Mrs. Thomas Cutts of Saco. We see in both figures a radical simplicity of pose that almost perfectly masks the complexity of the lives that meshed together when this painter and these sitters engaged one another in a world without words.Cutts earned his fortune in shipbuilding, trading, and the lumber industry — in the “triangular trade,” a euphemism without equal that makes it seem as though the commerce were in geometry and not, among other things, half a million human beings.
This efficient mercantile relay system was central to the early American economy. American goods (sugar, rum) would sail for England for sale to the British; from there the ship, emptied of its cargo, got stocked with British goods (textiles, weapons) and sailed for West Africa. Here the British goods were sold to buy slaves. They occupied the same storage spaces where barrels of rum had sat a month before, bound for the American experiment.
Cutts’s fleshy claw holds a staff and his thick wool cloak all but dissolves into the wall behind him. His ethereal legs are held in place by Brewster’s drawing and his drawing alone. Those hands: throughout Brewster’s work it is the figures’ hands and eyes that have substance, that are emplaced in the universe he depicts — everything else is seeps into the canvas. The relation between eyes and hands, soul and work is intentional and fundamental; there is no better script than this for the Puritans he painted.
Woman in a landscape |
Susannah Perkins Perkins and her husband Thomas of Kennebunk, Puritan figures both, sat for Brewster in 1797. And though Brewster’s work is full of artistic license taken with respect to the rendering of bodily proportion, in this pair of portraits his rendering of his sitters’ stiff carriage and granite comportment seems dead-on and utterly believable despite its likely significant distance from anatomical fact.Susannah Perkins Perkins’s face is broad, her features flat, her demeanor austere but not without warmth. We cannot know whether Brewster saw in her a kindness that he let out ever so subtly — in the soft sepia of her eyes, the gentle interlock of her arms cradling nothing in particular, the tiny prayer book she fingers — or whether he simply willed it to exist and invented it as such; the beads of amber are strung round her neck so tight they might well be the material extravagance that ends her pious days.
Brewster evokes a decent man under her husband’s five o’clock shadow (could no man in the 18th century get a truly close shave?), a fellow whose only hint of decadence seems to have been the almost luminous whiteness of his bowtie — the only instance of real impasto laid down by Brewster’s hand in either painting.
Mr. and Mrs. Perkins had first been painted with his-and-hers coonskin hats and with slightly broader shoulders. Brewster soon painted out these improprieties, but after two centuries the paintings have coughed up evidence of these pentimenti. Now the brim of Thomas’s disappeared cap leaves a pear-shaped half-hearted earthtone halo, and his left shoulder leaves an afterimage; with Susannah too the space around her skull seems to shimmer and sink, her squarer shoulders now softer somewhat but without a slump.
