Ralph Earl
Callahan Children, about 1785

Description
This is a half-length portrait of two girls. The older child stands to the left and faces forward. She has wavy, shoulder-length light-brown hair that is parted in the middle. Her eyes appear to be green, although a discolored varnish obscures the color. Her right shoulder is cut off at the left edge of the painting; her left shoulder appears to touch the other girl’s right one. She wears a white dress with lace trim at the neck and floral designs painted with a low impasto in the fabric. At her waist is a light blue ribbon that is only partially visible above the grouping of hands at bottom left. The older girl’s left arm is bent at the elbow, and the palm of that hand faces her body near her chest. The index finger on that hand is curled toward the body. The other fingers are in relaxed, though extended, positions. Her right hand reaches under and holds the wrist of a disembodied forearm and hand that enter the composition at the lower part of the left edge. That disembodied hand is turned slightly toward the viewer to reveal an oblong, orange-colored fruit.

The younger child stands to the right, with her left shoulder advanced and her head tilted to the viewer’s right. Her hair is lighter brown than the other child’s and is made up of many small curls. She has blue eyes. Like the other girl, she wears a white dress with lace trim, floral pattern, and blue sash at the waist. Her left arm crosses her body, and that hand reaches for the fruit in the hand that enters the painting from the left side of the painting. The younger girl’s right arm is not visible.

Earl rendered volumes simply, in nearly geometric forms. Light is implied to fall from the upper left to the lower right. The artist appears to have achieved shadows in the faces by painting yellow and red flesh tones over a gray or brown underpainting. The edges of both girls’ fingers are rendered in dark red to suggest their volume.

The background is light in the upper-left corner, darker at the upper center and center-right. The upper-right corner features a red curtain that drapes from top-center to center-right.

Biography
The girls were the children of Captain John Callahan (1745–1806) and Lucretia Greene Callahan (1748–1824). John was born in Cork, Ireland, and ran away at age ten. He eventually became a sea captain who was well known among Boston merchants and others involved in the shipping trade there. Callahan is said to have opposed slavery and freed his own slaves.1 On October 27, 1774, he wed Lucretia Greene, daughter of Benjamin Greene and Mary Chandler Greene, at Trinity Church in Boston.2 Lucretia’s diary (1776–78) demonstrates that she frequently traveled with her husband; three of their seven children were born abroad.3 John Callahan died in Demerara (Surinam). He was characterized in his obituary as a fond husband; an indulgent parent; a worthy member of society and an honest man.4 His probate inventory lists a modest accumulation of personal property valued at $236.80, including 110 books but no portraits.5

Although the girls’ identities have not been firmly established, they are likely Mary (1776–1855) and Eleanor Clifford Callahan (1778–1839), who were nine and seven, respectively, in 1785, the year the portrait is thought to have been executed.6 Mary was born in London and died unmarried in Boston. Eleanor was born in Antigua and died, also unmarried, in Groton, Massachusetts. If the proposed date is correct, the children cannot be Abigail (1784–1821) and Lucretia (1788–1838), as family tradition and previous scholars have identified them.7

Analysis

Figure 1. Ralph Earl, John Callahan, about 1785, oil on bed ticking, 28 3/8 x 24 1/8 in. (71.9 x 61.2 cm), Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Gift of Miss Anne R. Winslow, New York, 1968, MHS Neg. #1491. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Not to be reproduced without the written permission of the Society.
The painting is one of three fragments of what originally was a family portrait. The complete canvas featured John Callahan(fig. 1), seated to the left of the two girls, and themother, Lucretia, presumably to their right. Callahanfaces slightly toward his daughters at the right, his eyes filled with an expression of admiration and amusement. His left hand holds a piece of fruit that he is offering them. That arm is truncated below the elbow in the fragment representing John Callahan and continues on the approximately three-quarters of an inch of canvas found on the edge of the stretcher. If the father’s portrait were removed from its present stretcher and placed next to the fragment of the children, there would be a gap of approximately one and a quarter inches, presumably created when the portraits were divided and slightly cut down. The older girl’s right hand cups the father’s outstretched arm at the wrist; the younger one’s left hand reaches for the fruit. Both girls look at the viewer. The bottom edge of the girls’ portrait extends about three and a half inches below the present length of the father’s portrait; his likeness extends about seven and three-quarters inches above the top edge of the children’s. When added to the height of the fragment of John Callahan’s portrait, these dimensions suggest an original height of at least thirty-nine and a half inches.

The portrait of the father has been cleaned but not the one of his daughters at least in recent times. As a result, John Callahan’s likeness possesses an overall cool tonality, whereas the image of his children is atypically warm due to its yellowed varnish. The location of the fragment containing Lucretia’s portrait is not known.8

The fact that Ralph Earl returned from England in 1785 aboard the Neptune, a ship captained by John Callahan, suggests that the family portrait was painted during the artist’s voyage to America, perhaps in partial passage payment for the artist and his wife.9

An inscription on the John Callahan fragment, apparently written by one of the Callahan children, notes that the painting is By Earl, 1785. [Father was] aged 40 when this was taken.10 That the painting was done on a makeshift support of bed ticking lends further credence to the suggestion that it was made while Earl was in transit. The Callahan portraits are not unique in being painted on such a surface, however. In 1794 Earl painted Major John Davenport and Mrs. John Davenport (both Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven) using that readily available support.11 Other artists occasionally used this material, too, for example, Joseph Badger in his full-length Captain-Lieutenant John Larrabee (about 1750).

Among Earl’s fellow passengers on the Neptune was Dr. Joseph Trumbull (1756–1824). An apothecary-doctor who frequently traveled to London to supply his shop in Petersham, Massachusetts, Trumbull sold medicine, surgical instruments, medical books, Bibles and other books, Queens ware, and various imports.12 He and the artist were friends, and Trumbull sat to Earl for his portrait in England in 1784 (Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts). The doctor also was a friend of the Callahans and at one point owned the family portrait under discussion. His will shows that the painting was still intact in 1823:

I give to Mr. John Callahan a large family Painting being the Portraits of his late Father Capt. John Callahan, his Mother now living, and some of his Sisters, given to me by his said Father & Mother as a token of friendship. Should said John Callahan be deceased, I give the said Picture to his eldest Sister, or eldest Sister, in succession who may wish for its possession.13

Although it is not known just when the portrait was cut apart, it probably had been divided by 1903, when a family genealogy recorded that Portraits of Captain Callahan and his wife are now owned by Mrs. Benjamin P. Winslow of Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.14 Since there is no mention here of the girls’ likenesses, the parts of the painting had probably long since been allocated to different branches of the family.

Figure 2. Ralph Earl, Angus Nickelson and Family, about 1790, 42 1/2 x 58 in. (108 x 147.3 cm), Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, Gift of Robert L. Munson, 1969.01.
Earl painted relatively few family portraits, perhaps because for him, as for most other early American painters, such compositions proved quite challenging. Angus Nickelson and Family (fig. 2), for example, demonstrates Earl’s limitations at integrating figures in a group through a combination of pose, gesture, and gaze as more accomplished artists typically would. The two children embraced by their parents are the only ones who are closely linked. Except for some partial overlapping, each of the other members of the Nickelson family is self-contained and gazes, individually, at the viewer.

Earl was more successful at integrating two or three figures in a composition. For example, Mrs. Benjamin Tallmadge and Son Henry Floyd and Daughter Maria Jones (1790, Litchfield Historical Society, Litchfield, Connecticut) builds upon the pyramid formed by the mother’s form and her voluminous skirt. The infant Maria sits on Mrs. Tallmadge’s lap and is mostly contained within the contours of the larger figure. The boy, Henry, sits on the floor, his pose and costume echoing those of his mother.

Perhaps the relative insularity of figures in the Callahan family portrait suggested to one of its owners that it could be divided readily and shared among various descendants.15

Notes
1. Clarke 1903, 257.

2. Oliver and Peabody 1982, 757.

3. Lucretia Greene Callahan diary, 1776–78, manuscript, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

4. As cited in Chandler 1872, 250.

5. Suffolk County Probate Court, Boston, case no. 22870.

6. Clarke 1903, 257–58.

7. See, for example, Sawitzky and Sawitzky 1960, 40; and Kornhauser 1988, 269. For the family tradition that the painting represents Abigail at age ten and Lucretia at seven, see notes kept by Mary Marsh, who was descended from Lucretia and was among the donors of the painting to the Worcester Art Museum, as sent to Laura K. Mills by Henry H. Marsh, September 29, 1998.

8. A second portrait of Mrs. Callahan, by an unidentified artist in oil on panel, is in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Oliver 1988, 22.

9. This conjecture was first made in Sawitzky and Sawitzky 1960, 35. Earl’s place on the Neptune is documented by a passenger list published in Salem Gazette, May 24, 1785, and in Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, Or, the Worcester Gazette, May 26, 1785. The latter source gives May 19 as the date the ship landed in Boston.

10. Oliver 1988, 21.

11. Kornhauser 1988, 279; idem, 1991a, 32.

12. Advertisements, Thomas’ Massachusetts Spy, or, the Worcester Gazette, July 14, 1785, and August 4, 1785.

13. Trumbull will.

14. Clarke 1903, 258.

15. See also Earl’s Mrs. Noah Smith and Her Children (1798, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).