American Furniture, Folk & Decorative Arts

Dr. Horace Holley was a native of Salisbury, Connecticut, who studied divinity at Yale. Although initially a staunch Calvinist, he became a Unitarian, a radical movement which cast doubt on the divinity of Jesus Christ as well as the Bible as an undisputed source of literal truth, and focused instead on the transcendental nature of faith. “Religion does not consist so much in thinking as in feeling and acting,” he once wrote.  Holley’s renown as an intellectual came to the attention of certain community leaders in Lexington who were committed to making local Transylvania University the most important center of higher learning in what was then thought of as “the west”.  With the encouragement of Henry Clay, he accepted the post in 1818. He proceeded to establish a highly respected medical school, and a law school guided by Kentucky’s most prominent legal minds. Not long after his arrival in Lexington, Holley was painted by Matthew Harris Jouett, recently returned from study with Gilbert Stuart in Boston.   That portrait was presented by the artist to Transylvania University and eventually hung in their Morrison Chapel, until occupied by Federal Forces during the Civil War; it was then missing until 1896 when found in a Lexington junk store, purchased by a donor and returned to Transylvania.   

The portrait at hand is a variant of that work.  Recent discoveries in primary sources and clarification of provenance details confirm the attribution to Jouett.  It is recorded as number 135 in the list of Jouett works compiled by his grandson, Richard Jouett Menefee, published in 1902. (Samuel Woodson Price, The Old Masters of the Bluegrass, Louisville:  Filson Club, 1902, p. 54) At that time it was listed as the property of W. E. Burr of St. Louis.  He was the husband of Holley’s granddaughter Harriette Brand, whose mother was Harriette Holley, who married Moses Brand in Lexington in 1825.  His parents and several members of the extended Brand family were painted by Jouett and may have commissioned this work as a wedding present. Close examination of the painting disclosed several Jouett characteristics.  The left ear is highlighted in a red glaze intended to offset the warm flesh tones beneath the left eye.  There is also evidence of Jouett’s noted “standing white” a medium he created by mixing lead white paint with turpentine, which after drying, left a thick impasto on the surface. This portrait is also on panel of the type often used by Jouett, the back of which has been sized with a chalky medium frequently seen in his works. Downing and Grant, a paint and paper supply store near Jouett’s studio in downtown Lexington, carried these panels.    

Holley’s association with Transylvania did not have a happy ending.  He was hounded by the Presbyterians and some in the local press. In 1824 the Argus of Western America in Frankfort accused him of “promoting the Federalist Party’s beliefs, deism and ‘dandyism’”. In his funeral oration for Transylvania’s great benefactor Colonel James Morrison, he insinuated that the Presbyterians were a common nuisance.  Soon after that funeral he was replaced in the chapel pulpit by a rotating group of ministers from the main Protestant denominations.  He resigned his office and departed Lexington, only to die in late July, 1827, one week before Jouett’s death in August.  

 

LITERATURE: 

Eblen, Tom and Mollie Eblen.  “Horace Holley and the struggle for Kentucky’s mind and soul”, in James C. Klotter and Daniel Rowland, editors, Bluegrass Renaissance. Lexington:  University Press of Kentucky, 2012.

 

Floyd, William Barrow. Jouett-Bush-Frazer: Early Kentucky Artists. Lexington, KY: Privately printed, 1968.

 

Pennington, Estill Curtis.  Lessons in Likeness: The Portrait Painter in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802-1920. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010.

 

Price, Samuel Woodson.  The Old Masters of the Bluegrass.  Louisville, Ky:  Filson Club, 1902. 

We would like to thank Mr. Estill Curtis Pennington for providing this detailed description of the painting, for his research, and for confirming the attribution.