After mysteriously disappearing from the North American colonies for six years, probably working in the West Indies, Wollaston resurfaced in Charleston, where he worked from 1765 to 1767. Wollaston’s Charleston portraits reveal a complexity not seen in his earlier work, as well as a stronger sense of confidence. They are also characterized by greater detail in costume, a Rococo palette, softer edges, and halo effects around the sitters’ heads, features apparent in this charming portrait of a young boy dressed in a pink silk waistcoat and buff-colored jacket, standing before a rosy sky and caressing his adoring pet.

Jeremiah Theus (B.60.50), Charleston’s portraitist of record, was still active in the late 1760s, and while the relationship between these two artists is unknown, Wollaston certainly received commissions from families whose members had also been painted by Theus. One such family was the Holmeses. In fact, the Holmeses were unique in the patterns of commissions of Charleston families in that three artists—Theus, Wollaston, the Boston painter John Singleton Copley (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)—painted immediate family members. William’s father, Isaac Holmes, moved from Boston to Charleston sometime before 1759, when he married Rebecca Bee (c. 1741–1821), a member of a prominent Charleston family. Isaac and Rebecca had two sons, John Bee Holmes (1760–1827) and William (1762–c. 1818/20). The father died in 1763, and two years later John was painted by Copley in Boston (see related examples). When Wollaston came to Charleston, Mrs. Holmes turned to him, not Theus, to have portraits painted of her and her second son. 

William’s portrait has long been considered a pendant to Copley’s earlier portrait of his brother. Both are the same size and both show boys with pets associated with childhood—a chained squirrel for John and a dog for William. The young John looks toward his left while William turns his head toward his right, subtle compositional devices common to pendant portraiture. However, other alternatives are possible. The portrait of the sitters’ mother, Rebecca Bee Holmes, also a work by Wollaston from his Charleston period, together with the portraits of the sons may have functioned as a triptych, with the mother at center, or as the pendant to the Wollaston portrait of William, in which the mother inclines her head toward her younger son.

Related examples: Wollaston, Rebecca Bee Holmes, c. 1765–67, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts; Copley, John Bee Holmes (1765, the Dietrich American Foundation, Philadelphia, on loan to PMA); and Theus, Portrait of a Man, Thought to Be Isaac Holmes, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts. Stylistically similar to Wollaston’s Holmses portraits are Wollaston’s portraits of Ann Gibbes, 1767, Worcester Art Museum, and Judith Smith, 1767, Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston.

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.