Samuel Lovett Waldo

Samuel Lovett Waldo

(1783-1861)

Samuel Lovett Waldo was born in Windham, Connecticut. He began studying painting at the age of sixteen with the Reverend Joseph Steward, who had recently opened a studio in Hartford. By the time Waldo was twenty, he had opened his own studio there.

In search of commissions, the young artist spent three profitable winters painting portraits in Charleston, South Carolina, which enabled him to fulfill his wish to study in England. He arrived in London early in 1806 with letters of introduction to Benjamin West and John Singleton Copley from fellow Connecticut artist John Trumbull. Under West’s guidance, Waldo improved his drawing skills and entered the Royal Academy in 1808. That year, he was married to Englishwoman Elizabeth Wood and had a portrait accepted for the Royal Academy exhibition. The London years were invaluable in exposing him to works not only by the great masters but by contemporary artists as well.

Returning to America the following year, Waldo opened a studio in New York City, where he would remain for more than half a century. He earned his reputation during the War of 1812 with his portraits of war heroes. In 1815 he won a commission from the city of New York for a lifesize portrait of Alexander Macomb, victor of the battle at Plattsburgh. Waldo was elected a director of the American Academy of Fine Arts in 1817 and served until the institution closed in 1839. In 1817 he and his apprentice, William Jewett established the firm of Waldo and Jewett.

Waldo continued painting portraits and a few genre paintings on his own as well as executing portraits with Jewett. Both artists exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, where Waldo became a founding member in 1826. There is evidence that he returned occasionally to Connecticut for commissions and, perhaps, to visit family. He also traveled to New Orleans and, in his later years, to England.

Waldo’s skillful but sympathetic naturalism won him many commissions during his long career; he was still painting the year he died. He was generous in giving instruction and advice to young artists who came to him, and his competence was acknowledged by patrons and by fellow artists. Portraits by Waldo and by Waldo and Jewett may be found in major American museums.

“The Independent Beggar” (1819

Oil on panel, 20 x 15 3/4 in. (50.8 x 40 cm)

Harriet Russell Stanley Fund (1958.7)

The Independent Beggar

Waldo painted “The Independent Beggar” in 1819, a significant year considering the subject. The country was deep in an economic depression and the city streets were full of the homeless and penniless. Painting a portrait of one of these unfortunates was an unusual choice for an American artist at the time. A few members of the public appreciated seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish paintings of boors and gypsies and admired scenes of peasants by English artists George Morland and David Wilkie, but these subjects were at an emotional, as well as geographical, distance. An encounter with an American beggar in the larger urban areas of the country was an everyday occurrence in 1819.

American artists John Krimmel and Francis Guy were painting urban and rural scenes peopled with stereotypical representatives of the social classes, but Waldo concentrated on the personalities of the figures in his genre paintings and may have been the first American artist to do so. His depiction of the beggar also lacks sentimentality, the quality that would make later American genre paintings more acceptable to the public.

Waldo left no diaries or journal that might have included comments on why he painted the subject. It is recorded, however, that he hired a specific man, presumably a vagrant, to model. (1) The New Britain portrait is one of three oil sketches of the head of this subject. Waldo undoubtedly executed these sketches before he painted the large half-figure “Independent Beggar” (ca. 1819; Boston Athenaeum). All three versions show the same basic features of the model, but each has its own character. None appears to have been preliminary to the larger work. The sketches and the large painting are on panel and share a textured surface applied to the wood to give it the semblance of woven fabric, a common technique in Waldo's oeuvre. (2)

In the New Britain painting, the beggar faces left almost in profile, his head leaning on his right hand. The pose is rather pensive, perhaps meant to suggest despair. His face is still smooth, free of wrinkles, and shows no evidence of a beard. Compared to the other sketches, the shadows that would age the face and dramatize the mood have yet to be added. The model's right hand and wrist are also unfinished, the left wrist is just sketched in. The artist considered a lighter area behind the beggar's head, planning where the lights would fall on his face.

In the other versions (1819; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and ca. 1819; Cleveland Museum of Art) the beggar faces the viewer; each painting shows a different side of the head. In both, the figure has grown older and more unkempt. He is wary in the Cleveland portrait but humble in the painting at the Metropolitan. Waldo seemed to be searching for a specific mood. The New Britain oil sketch may have been the starting point of the series. Eventually, in the large painting, the pose and personality of the beggar would change completely to a self-confident figure at ease. It was this self-assured poise that undoubtedly suggested the title of the work, “The Independent Beggar,” though the painting has been given unauthorized titles over the years.

Waldo specifically referred to the large painting as “The Independent Beggar” when he wrote to the Boston Atheneum concerning their purchase of the work in 1829. In correspondence with the artist, the Atheneum also referred to the painting by that title and exhibited it as such for many years. As for the oil sketches of the head, one was exhibited as “Head of a Beggar” in Hartford in 1825 and one appeared in the New York Metropolitan Fair in 1864, presumably sent by Waldo's estate, as “The Independent Beggar.”

More than sixty-five years after Waldo painted “The Independent Beggar” the sitter acquired the name "Old Pat," which was attached to the title by the owners of the painting. There is, however, no evidence that this was the man's name and it was never used by the artist.

MG

Bibliography:

"Artist Biography, Samuel L. Waldo," Crayon 8 (May 1861): 98.

William Dunlap, “A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States”, ed. Alexander Wyckoff, 3 vols. (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1965), vol. 2, p. 355;

Notes:

1. Dunlap, History, vol. 3, p. 61.

2. Marcia Goldberg, "Textured Panels in Nineteenth-Century American Painting," “Journal of the American Institute for Conservation 32” (spring 1993): 33.