Joseph Badger

Very little is known about the career of Joseph Badger, one of America's colonial painters. He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, the son of a tailor. Instead of following his father's vocation, Badger became a house painter and a glazier. He married Catherine Smith Felch in 1731 and they moved to Boston in 1733. Two of their children, Joseph and William, became painters in Charleston, South Carolina; they probably joined their uncle Daniel Badger, a house and ship painter who moved there in 1735. It is not known how or when Badger received his training in portraiture, yet he would have had ample exposure to the art in Boston. John Smibert, Thomas Johnston, John Greenwood, Peter Pelham, and the young John Singleton Copley lived in Badger's neighborhood around Battle Square Church; several merchants in the area sold British mezzotints, which provided inspiration for the costumes and poses in Badger's portraits.

Badger spent his entire professional career in the Boston area, painting as many as 150 portraits between 1740 and 1765. For a few years after Smibert's death in 1751-- before Joseph Blackburn's arrival from Newport in 1754 and Copley's ascendancy in the 1760s--Badger was the principal painter in Boston. His patrons included many clergymen, well-to-do merchants, and other prominent members of Boston society. Many f his sitters were related, and thus his commissions were likely obtained through word of mouth, which may account for his lack of newspaper advertisements. He was rarely listed as a limner in eighteenth-century documents, so portraiture may have formed only a small percentage of his business.

Many art historians have dismissed Badger's works as stiff and formal and his style as amateur, uneven, and flawed. His flesh tones are of an unhealthy color and show little modeling, while eyes, hands and other features are often poorly drawn. Nearly all of his portraits are executed in somber browns, blacks, grays and greenish blues and many incorporate standard poses and costumes drawn from mezzotints, a common practice among colonial painters. Nevertheless, Badger's paintings have a certain honesty and charm. His talent can be better appreciated when one realizes the limitations under which he and other painters of his day worked: a lack of adequate instruction, an absence of pictures from which to study, a scarcity of art books, and an atmosphere not particularly congenial to art. The next generation of colonial portraitists, which include Benjamin West, Charles Willson Peale, and Copley, was able to improve upon the works they found as models, mainly through the benefit of European Training.