Folk
JOHN BRADLEY (active 1826–1847)
Portrait of Mr. Newton, 1836
Oil on canvas, 31 1/4 x 28 in.
Signed, dated, and inscribed (at lower left): I. Bradley Pinxit 1836
RECORDED: Mary Childs Black and Stuart P. Feld, “Drawn by I. Bradley From Great Britton,” Antiques XC (October 1966), pp. 505, 506 fig. 13 illus., 507 // Mary Childs Black and Stuart P. Feld, “Drawn by I. Bradley From Great Britton,” The National Gallery of Canada Bulletin 4 (1966), pp. 3, 4, 6 fig. 11 illus. [reprint of Antiques article] // M. C. Trexler, “Update on John Bradley, New York City Nineteenth-Century Folk Painter,” February 25, 2006, http://www.hihosarah.com/bradley.htm
EX COLL.: Dr. Lyle Harrington, Barneveld, New York, by 1966; private collection, until 2007
Portrait of Mr. Newton was executed in 1836, when Bradley was at the 56 Hammersley Street address. The sitter’s identity comes from its onetime owner, Dr. Lyle Harrington of Barneveld, New York. It is believed to portray a Mr. Newton of Newton Hook, New York, a small community in the township of Stuyvesant, which is approximately one hundred miles up the Hudson River from New York City. It is impossible to know if Bradley traveled up to Newton Hook or whether Mr. Newton called upon Bradley in his New York studio. While it was not uncommon for limners to travel in search of commissions, Bradley is not known to have strayed from the New York City area.
Tradition has it that the vivid battle scene seen in the distance at right, which shows American soldiers battling Indians on a high bluff with palm trees, depicts a skirmish from the Seminole Wars, and that Mr. Newton, who is dressed in what is clearly a military uniform, was likely a veteran from the wars. The first Seminole War lasted from 1816 to 1819, and the second outbreak of violence stared in 1835, the year before the present portrait was painted. (The second Seminole War concluded in 1842.) The uniform Mr. Newton wears, tentatively identified as a light infantry variant of the hussar “dolman” uniform, is more of the type that would have been worn during the period of the first Seminole War. The combination of epaulette on one shoulder and wing on the other is highly unusual; the length of the fringe on the epaulet indicates that Mr. Newton achieved a field grade of major or above. Black and Feld state that Newton was a cavalry officer in the New York State militia; it may be that Mr. Newton was a veteran of the first Seminole War, and that when he had his likeness taken by Bradley in 1836, he posed in his uniform from that time as a point of pride and a reminder of the renewed conflict between the Seminoles and the United States.
