Miss Hogg began acquiring colonial American paintings more than thirty years after she started her collection of decorative arts. Portrait of John Gerry by Joseph Badger is her first acquisition in this area. Little is known of this elusive painter. Badger, like many early colonial American artists, aspired to be a portraitist but, to make a living, also painted houses, coaches, and signs. The son of a tailor living in Charlestown, Massachusetts, young Badger moved to Boston in the 1730s. No information on his early training exists, none of his letters or diaries survives, and none of the paintings attributed to him is signed. Although he was insolvent at the time of his death in 1765, Badger enjoyed a relatively modest twenty-year career as a portraitist in Boston. After John Smibert (B.72.7, B.72.8) began failing in his abilities in the early 1740s, and before Joseph Blackburn’s arrival in Boston in 1755 and John Singleton Copley’s artistic success by the late 1750s (see B.54.31, B.54.21, B.54.25, B.54.18, B.54.26, B.54.27, B.54.29, B.54.28, and B.54.30), Badger was one of the few competent portraitists in a thriving city of roughly 16,000 people.

The commission to paint John Gerry (1741–1786), son of Thomas and Elizabeth Greenleaf Gerry, came early in Badger’s career. The date of the portrait derives from the inscription giving Gerry’s age and from his birthdate of October 8, 1741. The Gerrys were a prominent family living in a grand three-story house in Marblehead, Massachusetts. John’s father was a sea captain and merchant and commander of Fort Sewall. The Gerry brothers John, Samuel, and Elbridge continued the merchant trade they inherited from their father. John served as naval officer of the port of Marblehead during the War of Independence. He married Sarah Quincy Wendell of Boston in 1763 and had one daughter, Sarah (Sally), in whose family this portrait descended, along with the coat worn by the sitter in his portrait (B.69.245).

Badger appears to have painted only one Gerry child, John, the fourth child born in a family of sixteen, few of whom survived childhood, and the second surviving son. The eldest son was his brother Thomas. John Gerry appears suitably grand in this portrait. He stands in a fictitious classical architectural setting with a luminous landscape behind him. The bird that he holds and his gesture of pointing to the ground below are stock conventions in Baroque painting, which Badger could have borrowed from mezzotint engravings after English aristocratic portraits. Although the sitter is only three years and eight months old, as the inscription testifies, he wears the costume of a gentleman, in keeping with portrait customs of the time.

Badger never attained the brilliance of Robert Feke (B.71.81) or Copley. Badger’s sitters often appear stilted, rigid, and unconvincing. Some scholars, however, have recognized the “quaintness and...naive and piquant charm” or “wraith-like” qualities of Badger’s appealing portraits of children, for which he is best known and of which John Gerry stands as an excellent and early example.

Related examples: Only about ten of the approximately thirty paintings that Badger painted of children are full-length portraits, five of which are boys in a landscape with props: James Badger, 1760, MMA (with bird); Thomas Dawes, c. 1764, MFA, Boston (with orange); John Joy, Jr., 1758, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston (with dog); Jeremiah Belknap, c. 1758, Cleveland Museum of Art (with dog); Thomas Mason, c. 1758, private collection, Massachusetts (with squirrel).

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.