Joseph Badger

Joseph Badger (ca.1707–1765) was a portrait artist in Boston, Massachusetts in the 18th-century. He painted some 80 portraits of merchants, businessmen, clergy, and other notables, and their wives and children.

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Biography

Badger was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, to tailor Stephen Badger and Mercy Kettell. In 1731 he married Katharine Felch; they moved to Boston around 1733. He was a member of the Brattle Street Church.[1]

He "began his career as a house-painter and glazier, and ... throughout his life continued this work, besides painting signs, hatchments and other heraldic devices, in order to eke out a livelihood when orders for portraits slackened."[2]

Portrait subjects included:

Badger died in Boston in May, 1765, when "taken with an apoplectic fit as he was walking in his garden, and expired in a few minutes after."[16]

Works by Joseph Badger are in the collections of the Worcester Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Historic New England's Phillips House, Salem, Mass.

Image gallery

References

  1. ^ Park. 1918; p.4.
  2. ^ Park. 1918; p.5
  3. ^ Park. 1918.
  4. ^ http://www.yale.edu/opa/arc-ybc/v32.n5/story14.html
  5. ^ http://collections.si.edu
  6. ^ Park. 1918.
  7. ^ http://www.worcesterart.org/Collection/Early_American/
  8. ^ Joseph Badger and His Work, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Volume 51, Massachusetts HIstorical Society, Published by the Society, Boston, Massachusetts, 1918
  9. ^ Park. 1918.
  10. ^ In the portrait of Rebecca Orne as a child in the Worcester Art Museum, the sitter holds a squirrel. Badger incorporated an emblematic squirrel into some of his portraits; he "would seem to have the claim to primacy" of what later became a hot trend in colonial portraiture, common in the work of his contemporary John Singleton Copley. Cf. Roland E. Fleischer. Emblems and Colonial American Painting. American Art Journal, Vol. 20, No. 3 (1988); p.26
  11. ^ Susan Rather. Carpenter, Tailor, Shoemaker, Artist: Copley and Portrait Painting around 1770. Art Bulletin, v.79, No. 2, June 1997; p.288
  12. ^ Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
  13. ^ http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fa0257
  14. ^ Park. 1918.
  15. ^ Portrait of Whitefield, ca.1750, attributed to Joseph Badger. Harvard University Portrait Collection.
  16. ^ Boston Evening Post, 05-13-1765; p.3.

Further reading

External links