HISTORY in CONTEXT
Artworks at the NBMAA
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The subjects in the portraits of Samuel Moody and Hannah Minot Moody in 1758 by Joseph Badger descended from prominent Puritan families, the Bradstreets and the Moodys. These Massachusetts families settled New Hampshire and Maine. By the time this portrait was painted, the New England colonies were religiously diverse. They were changing politically and expanding economically. The seeds of religious diversity that are enjoyed today, were certainly sown in colonial America.
In the early republic Anglicanism drew Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright to the ministry in Hartford, though his grandfather had been a fiery Congregational minister in Boston in the 18th century. (Portrait by John Trumbull, 1820). In a sermon at Christ’s Church in Hartford in 1828, he spoke about the need to train missionaries to help in returning American blacks to Africa and ending slavery in America.[2]
The Puritan influence continued on into a later work, West Rock, New Haven, by one of America’s most esteemed painters in the 19th century, Frederic Church. Church was a Connecticut native, born in Hartford in 1826. With a strong interest in painting, he became the first pupil of Thomas Cole, America’s preeminent landscape painter and founder of the Hudson River School. The Hudson River School painters glorified the American landscape as an extraordinary wonder, a sentiment that contributed to its growing national identity.
Frederic Edwin Church’s “West Rock, New Haven,” 1849 not only reflected the beauty of the American landscape, but also harkened back to the English Civil War to give 19th-century Americans a message about their republican inheritance.
From 1629 to 1640 King Charles I suspended Parliament and ruled as an autocratic monarch without recourse to Parliament. Charles claimed his royal prerogative and the doctrine of the divine right of kings gave him this power. He needed Parliament to raise taxes. By October 1640, Charles I’s anti-Puritan religious policies had alienated Parliament, and in 1641 Parliament rebelled against the King. From 1642 to 1649, Parliament waged war against the King. When Charles I was captured, tried, and executed, England began an experiment in republicanism that its North American mainland colonies picked up 135 years later.
Church's painting, West Rock, New Haven, depicts Judges’ Cave at the top of the rock. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, the Crown sought justice against the judges who had signed Charles I’s death warrant. Three of these judges, William Goffe, Edward Whalley, and John Dixwell, fled for the colonies and found temporary shelter in the New Haven cave. Local Puritans fed them and protected them from agents of the King. Church’s depiction of West Rock reminded its viewers of the cause of the American Revolution as well as embodied American national aspirations and dreams.
