PORTRAIT OF ERASTUS EMMONS (1787-1823)

A mysterious artist, the full identity of James Brown has yet to be uncovered, but it is thought that he was from Brimfield, Massachusetts. His subjects were located from Williamstown to Plymouth, Massachusetts. On his travels in 1808, he painted the portraits of the Emmons family of Franklin, Massachusetts. The sitter of the present lot, Erastus Emmons was the youngest of the six children of Reverend Nathanel Emmons, D.D. and Martha Williams. Brown also painted their second youngest son, Williams (Sotheby’s, New York, 29 January 1994, lot 261). Both portraits were discovered by Nina Fletcher Little in the former home of the sitters’ sister, Mary and her husband Reverend Jacob Ide, D.D. in Medway, Massachusetts.

The Emmons brothers could not have been more different. The honorable Williams Emmons graduated from Brown in 1805, practiced law in Augusta, Maine and went on to hold a number of other political offices. Erastus was more of an immoral character, as illustrated by his father’s speech at Erastus’s funeral in January 1823: “He has lived, blinded by sin, and wholly given over to the vanities of the world, and his voice, which once sounded pleasant in your ears, now calls in accents of woe from the dread abyss, for you to be wiser and better than he was, and to seize hold of life eternal” (Elizabeth V. Warren, “The Mystery of J. Brown,” Folk Art (Fall 1998), p. 59).