Collection
Themes: MLC Portfolio: Race and Otherness
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This object is a member of the following groups (click any group name to view all objects in that group):
Themes: MLC Portfolio: Race and OthernessExhibitions: Learning to Look: The Addison at 90
Themes: MLC Portfolio: American Identity
Object Information
As a common working person who was the town barber, but especially as a person of color, Abraham Hanson was an unusual subject for a portraitist in the early nineteenth century. Most significant is the painting's honest, unprejudiced portrayal that varies dramatically from the contemporary stereotyped depictions of servile slaves. As Marvin Sandak claimed in The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, "successful in imparting a sense of the living man [was] the itinerant Down East painter Jeremiah Hardy (a pupil of Samuel Morse), whose broad-browed, weighty head of Abraham Hanson is confident and witty without genteel or minstel disguise . . . ." At least one other portrait of a person of color attributed to Hardy is a remarkably sensitive and noble portrait of a woman in a red shawl, presently in a private collection.
Jeremiah Pearson Hardy (1800–1887) was a provincial New England painter of portraits, genre, animals, and still-lifes. Born in Pelham, New Hampshire, he moved with his family to Hampden, Maine in 1811. Largely self-taught, he studied art briefly in Boston. Quoted in the one substantive article about Hardy published in the 1939 Old-Time New England, his daughter wrote, "His first teacher was Mr. Brown of Boston, himself a pupil of the English painter Moreland. A few years later he studied with Samuel F.B. Morse, of New York." His daughter also claimed that while in Boston in the 1820s Hardy visited Washington Allston's studio and knew Henry Inman. After setting up a studio in Boston, Hardy abruptly moved to Hampden in late 1826 or early 1827, followed in 1828 by a move to Bangor where he remained for the rest of his life. Writing of Hanson's work of this period, his daughter noted, "He was constantly studying problems of composition and lighting . . . .Now were done such pictures as those of his parents, of his uncles the Pearson brothers, the Indian girl Sarah and the negro barber, Hanson, with genre pictures and firelight and candlelight studies. These pictures not only developed his talent but they were needed to hang upon the walls of his bare little studio, and variety there was essential." While she added that these pictures were never intended for sale, it is hard to imagine that Hardy could sustain himself without encouraging sales. His existing portraits of family and local sitters show a capable painter producing likenesses in the manner of Morse.
Sarah Vure and Susan Faxon
Exhibition History
This object was included in the following exhibitions:
American Painting and Sculpture Exhibition, International Student Center, 3/25/1952 - 6/9/1952Exhibition of Paintings from The Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass, Western Canada Art Circuit, 11/15/1953 - 6/3/1954
Loan exhibition of American Paintings, Topsfield Public Library, 5/15/1955 - 6/15/1955
Loan to Stevens Memorial Library, Stevens Memorial Library, 5/3/1957 - 7/9/1959
Artistic Highlights of American History, Addison Gallery of American Art, 1/10/1958 - 3/23/1958
Art in American History, Addison Gallery of American Art, 7/22/1962 - 10/28/1962
Maine and Its Artists, 1710-1963 [Colby College Sesquicentennial Exhibition], Colby College Museum of Art, 5/4/1963 - 8/31/1963
The Portrayal of the Negro in American Painting, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 5/15/1964 - 9/6/1964
The Works, Addison Gallery of American Art, 11/7/1969 - 2/22/1970
America, Laura Knott Gallery, Bradford College, 11/10/1970 - 11/25/1970
African Image: Representations of the Black throughout History, The Walters Art Gallery, 2/17/1980 - 3/30/1980
Heads: an exhibit which explores some of the many ways the human head has been u, Addison Gallery of American Art, 11/7/1980 - 12/7/1980
Boys and Girls, Men and Women, Addison Gallery of American Art, 4/12/1990 - 6/10/1990
American Portraits: Colonial to Contemporary, Addison Gallery of American Art, 4/21/1992 - 5/10/1992
Faces of the Addison: Portraits from the Collection, Addison Gallery of American Art, 4/23/1994 - 7/31/1994
Addison Gallery of American Art: 65 Years, Addison Gallery of American Art, 4/13/1996 - 7/31/1996
E Pluribus Unum: Maine and the Making of a Nation, Maine Historical Society, 12/9/1999 - 10/31/2000
Identity and Intention: Two Centuries of American Portraiture, Addison Gallery of American Art, 9/4/2001 - 12/30/2001
Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century, Addison Gallery of American Art, 1/14/2006 - 11/26/2006
People, Places, Things: Symbols of American Culture, Addison Gallery of American Art, 9/4/2012 - 1/13/2013
Eye on the Collection: Artful Poses, Addison Gallery of American Art, 2/1/2014 - 3/30/2014
A Perfect Likeness: Folk Portraits and Early Photography, Fenimore Art Museum, New York State Historical Association, 10/10/2015 - 12/31/2015
Eye on the Collection, Addison Gallery of American Art, 4/1/2017 - 7/30/2017
The Art of Ambition in the Colonial Northeast, Addison Gallery of American Art, 9/1/2019 - 12/15/2019
Learning to Look: The Addison at 90, Addison Gallery of American Art, 5/8/2021 - 2/6/2022
At First Light: Two Centuries of Artists in Maine, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, 6/24/2022 - 11/6/2022
Unnamed Figures: Black Presence and Absence in Early American Vernacular Art, American Folk Art Museum, 11/13/2023 - 3/24/2024
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