Jacob Eichholtz exemplifies the itinerant, essentially self-taught artist who practiced a craftsman’s trade until he established himself as a successful portraitist. Of German heritage and trained as a copper- and tinsmith, Eichholtz lived and worked in Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and traveled to other cities such as Baltimore and Pittsburgh to paint. He contributed to the Neoclassical fashion of painting profile portraits already popularized by Charles Balthazar-Julien Févret de Saint-Mémin (see B.59.52, B.84.1, and B.77.20) and the Sharples family (see B.57.62 and B.57.63) during the 1790s and the early 1800s. 

The Bayou Bend portrait is one of Eichholtz’s early works, although its sophisticated handling suggests it was completed sometime after 1808. The portrait depicts the silversmith Standish Barry (1763–1844), with whom Eichholtz was close friends. In 1810, Barry changed careers, leaving silversmithing for the merchant trade, and later becoming a grocer and sugar refiner. His exact profession at the time of his portrait sitting is unknown, but he wears the black waistcoat and white stock of a fashionable gentleman.

Related examples: Eichholtz also painted Mrs. Lavallan Barry, the wife of Standish Barry’s brother, c. 1820, private collection, Atlantic, Virginia, as of 1969. A portrait, attributed to Rembrandt Peale, of Standish Barry in uniform is reproduced in Pleasants and Sill 1972. Other examples of portraits of craftsmen include John Singleton Copley’s portraits of the Boston engraver Nathanial Hurd, c. 1765, Cleveland Museum of Art, and the silversmith Paul Revere, c. 1768, MFA. Boston; Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of the Philadelphia clockmaker David Rittenhouse, 1772, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia; James Sharples’s portrait of the New York silversmith William Gilbert, private collection; and Charles Balthazar-Julien Fevret de Saint-Mémin’s Portrait of Paul Revere (B.84.1).

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.