Edward Savage

Edward Savage (1761–1817), active through America’s early years, capitalized on the opportunity to celebrate historic moments and personages through paintings, prints, and museum displays. A native of Princeton, Massachusetts, he may have trained as a goldsmith and, as some scholars suggest, gained skill as a draftsman and painter by making copies after John Singleton Copley. There is no other evidence of formal art instruction before 1789, when he arrived in New York with a letter from the president of Harvard College commissioning a portrait of President George Washington during his first year in office. Savage used this initial image of Washington and one of his wife Martha as the basis of subsequent compositions, in both painting and print formats, much like his friend, the painter and museum director Charles Willson Peale, who also made multiple versions of his portraits of statesmen. At least one oil copy of Savage’s original Washington portrait, for example, went to John Adams and is still in the collection of the Adams National Historic Site in Quincy, Massachusetts. [1] Savage used these likenesses to begin work on a large-scale family portrait of George and Martha Washington with her grandchildren, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

In 1791, Savage went to London, where he learned the art of engraving and found a market for prints after his portraits of George and Martha Washington. While there, he made the acquaintance of the influential American expatriate painter Benjamin West. In England, Savage continued work on the Washington family portrait. He completed the painting in 1796, after his return to the United States. Two years later, he made an engraving after the group portrait.

In addition to his work as a painter and engraver, Savage was responsible for establishing some of the first museums in the country in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, where he exhibited paintings and engravings by himself and others, natural history specimens, and “other interesting articles.” [2] He also used the museums as venues for the exhibition of his panoramas of cities including London and Philadelphia. He established his final museum venture in Boston in 1812, and died five years later in his hometown of Princeton, Massachusetts.

Notes:

[1] Charles Henry Hart, Edward Savage, Painter and Engraver, and His Unfinished Copper Plate of “Congress Voting Independence” (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1905), 6, and Ellen G. Miles, American Paintings of the Eighteenth Century (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, in association with the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1995), 148.

[2] The Daily Advertiser, June 10, 1802, quoted in Miles, American Paintings, 145.