With virtually no competition from other colonial painters until Wollaston’s arrival in 1765 (see B.54.20), Jeremiah Theus dominated the eighteenth-century art scene of Charleston, South Carolina, and its environs for about three decades. Charleston was the fifth-largest colonial town when Theus emigrated from Chur, a small town in easternmost Switzerland, around 1735. Charleston, or “Charles Town,” as it was known in the eighteenth century, was described by one contemporary observer as “a polite agreeable place, the people live very Gentile and very much in the English taste.” Theus’s portraits must have suited the Anglophile taste of his southern colonial sitters, for he produced numerous portraits of them patterned after the costumes and poses of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mezzotints of English aristocratic portraits (see related examples).

Theus’s portrait of Anne Livingston Champneys demonstrates Theus’s modest skill in rendering the shimmering quality of the sitter’s silk dress, its bejeweled bodice, the decorative patterns of lace that line the sleeves, the fur of the ermine trim, and the reflective surface of the pearls, all details that derive from mezzotint sources. The rather plain sitter shares facial mannerisms with other Theus sitters: an unusually large, pronounced nose, dimpled chin, and curvilinear, V-shaped lips. Theus typically used monochromatic, dark backgrounds against which the sitter was dramatically lit. In this portrait in particular, the strong chiaroscuro amplifies the silvery folds of the subject’s dress.

The circumstances surrounding the commission of the portrait are unknown. Anne Livingston Champneys (b. 1746–d. after 1776) probably had her portrait painted in Charleston in the early 1760s, possibly in 1763, the year of her marriage to John Champneys, a Charleston merchant and Loyalist. The only reference to her was published in her marriage notice in the November 5, 1763, issue of the South-Carolina Gazette, in which she is described as “an amiable young lady.” No known portraits of Anne’s siblings or her husband exist. The portrait descended in the family of the Champneys’s only surviving child, Sarah Champneys Tunno.

Related examples: The sitter’s costume relates to those in other portraits by Theus, including Mrs. James Skirving, Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston; Mrs. John Dart, MMA; and Mrs. Samuel Prioteau III, United Missouri Bancshares. A source for these portraits was probably James Watson’s mezzotint engraving of Lady Ann Fortescue after Francis Cotes and James McArdell’s 1757 mezzotint after Sir Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of the same sitter. The gesture of her head resting on her fingers is not usual in Theus’s oeuvre; its mezzotint source may have been John Simon’s engraving of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, after Sir Godfrey Kneller, c. 1706; see Sellers 1957, p. 449.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.