1832

Portrait of Elias Dexter

George W. Twibill, Jr.

American, 1806 - 1836

Elias Dexter (1816–1897), publisher, engraver, photographer, and frame maker, is best known for his 1862 publication The St.-Mémin Collection of Portraits, described by Smithsonian curator Ellen Miles as “the major source of information” on the work of French-born artist Charles B.J.F. de Saint-Mémin. Dexter’s career as an art historian grew from his own experience as a portrait photographer and print seller. From 1844 to 1872 his New York studio and gallery at 562 Broadway received such sitters as Admiral David Farragut and John Hunt Morgan. By 1881, Dexter had moved to England; the British census that year lists him as a sixty-five-year-old widower and print seller, residing at 10 Great Russell Street in London.

This portrayal of Dexter was made much earlier in his life by Pennsylvania painter George W. Twibill, Jr., whom art historian William H. Gerdts described as “the country’s leading master in cabinet portraiture,” referring to likenesses that are larger than miniatures but smaller than life-size. Born in the town of Lampeter in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, Twibill began studying in New York with Henry Inman in 1828, while at the National Academy of Design. He married his teacher’s wife’s sister and launched a promising career, winning election as an associate of the academy in 1832, the first year he exhibited there. The following year he rose to the rank of full academician. Twibill, whose few extant works include portraits of John Trumbull and Gideon Lee, died at the age of thirty. Upon his death, Thomas Seir Cummings, Inman’s student and partner, wrote, “Of the young artists of the day there were none more promising than Twibill. His portraits in oil in small were of excellence seldom equaled.”

This excellence is evident in this portrait, which shows Dexter with the typical surroundings of the romantic period: a swathe of red drapery and a view to a landscape beyond. The influence of Inman and Cummings, masters of both portrait and miniature painting in New York and Philadelphia in this period, is clear in the young artist’s work.