To gaze upon the privileged world - two interiors by Henry Sargent, 1821-24

 

The Dinner Party, oil on canvas, 61 5/8 x 49 3/4 inches, circa 1821.

Text is adapted from the Museum of Fine Arts Boston's website:

Henry Sargent’s painting gives us a glimpse of a fashionable dinner party in 1820s Boston. The dishes for the main course have been cleared, the tablecloth has been removed, and nuts, fruit, and wine are being offered for dessert. The single candle on the table is provided to enable the diners to light their tobacco. The shutters are drawn to keep out the sun, for during this period dinner parties were held in the middle of the afternoon. This gathering may represent a meeting of a specific group: the Wednesday Evening Club, which met weekly for dinner and discussion at members’ houses. The club, which survives today, consisted in Sargent’s time of four clergymen, four doctors, four lawyers, and four “merchants, manufacturers or gentlemen of literature and leisure.” Guests were sometimes included at the dinners, which would explain why there are more than sixteen in attendance here. Sargent, possibly the third figure on the right side of the table, was a successful politician and inventor as well as a talented painter, and he may well have belonged to the club. However, no membership records were kept at this time. Therefore, it's also impossible to be certain what specific gathering is represented here.

In addition to being an invaluable document of social customs among Federal Boston’s elite, the painting preserves the appearance of an upper-class interior. This elegant room was most likely Sargent’s own dining room at 10 Franklin Place on Tontine Crescent, a handsome row of townhouses - no longer extant - built by celebrated architect Charles Bulfinch in 1793-94. The contents of the room - the sideboard, the expensive Wilton carpet (here protected by a green baize “crumb cloth”), paintings, a large looking glass, and a dining table big enough to accommodate many guests comfortably - conform to those recommended by Thomas Sheraton, the English designer and tastemaker. The cellaret in the foreground, used to cool bottles of wine, was a new form; it remained in Sargent’s family and was given to the Museum by one of the artist’s descendants.

Although the painting records a private event, it was created for exhibition. In the 1820s, visitors willing to pay twenty-five cents could see it in a gallery operated by the drawing master David Brown. Business was brisk; presumably the picture was enjoyed not only by Sargent’s social circle but also by those who could not afford such luxurious surroundings yet enjoyed getting a glimpse into such an elite world.

It should be noted that an African American servant or servants are featured in both paintings. Slavery was effectively
abolished in Massachusetts in the 1780s, though not formally so until the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

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The Tea Party, oil on canvas, 64 3/8 x 52 3/8 inches, circa 1824.

Because of the commercial success of the public display of Sargent’s The Dinner Party, David Brown commissioned the artist to paint The Tea Party, hoping this second interior would prove equally popular. The two paintings were first shown together in Boston around May 1824, and over the next decade the entrepreneur toured the pair of canvases repeatedly, bringing them to New York, Philadelphia, and Montreal.

The casual deportment of mixed company in The Tea Party makes this composition an appropriate pendant to the more formal arrangement of The Dinner Party. Like The Dinner Party, The Tea Party may well represent Sargent’s own home. One contemporary critic noted: “The rooms and furniture [are] delightfully painted, and with the most minute fidelity.” This is an upper-class interior, with two richly appointed parlors filled with fashionably attired figures. The women wear stylish Empire gowns. The furnishings reflect the latest styles, following the recommendation of English designers who, like Sheraton, advised that the drawing room should feature the finest furniture and decorations in the house. Sargent carefully delineated the French-styled Empire armchairs and a marble-topped center table toward the middle of the first parlor; the table may be one that descended in the Sargent family and is now in the collection of the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. Other imported and domestic goods are displayed around the two rooms, including a pair of alabaster vases on pedestals in both corners of the first room, mirrors that help to reflect the warm artificial light in both spaces, and vases and urns on the mantelpiece. The walls of the room are lined with paintings - likely landscapes, a subject that Americans were just beginning to collect.

Both The Tea Party and The Dinner Party were reacquired by the artist from Brown before 1842, when Sargent displayed one of them in the first exhibition to be held at Chester Harding’s Boston gallery. The two paintings remained in the Sargent family after the artist’s death and were given to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1919.

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Henry Sargent (baptized 25 November 1770, Gloucester, Massachusetts - 21 February 1845, Boston), American painter and military officer. The son of a prosperous and public-spirited merchant, he apprenticed with his father, but reaching adulthood announced his intention to become an artist. When he was twenty, the artist John Trumbull, visiting Boston, saw some of his work and found it promising. Three years later, he went to London, where he studied with Benjamin West and met John Singleton Copley. Returning to Boston in 1799 he took a commission in the national army then being raised under the command of Alexander Hamilton. This service was brief, but it gave Sargent a taste for military life which motivated his long connection with the Massachusetts militia. Shortly after, he joined the Boston Light Infantry, which had been organized the year before and of which his brother, Daniel Sargent, was captain. By 1804 he was promoted to first lieutenant and by 1807, captain. In 1807 he also married. He and his wife would have four children, the two boys surviving to adulthood. During the War of 1812, his company aided in the fortification of Fort Strong, and in 1815, he was appointed aide-de-camp to the governor. Also, in 1812 and from 1815 to 1817 he was a member of the Massachusetts Senate. During the following decade, due to his increasing deafness, he gradually withdrew from public service and devoted himself entirely to his painting and to mechanical inventions. Continuing to paint at intervals down into old age, he was elected in 1840 an honorary member of the National Academy of Design. And he was made president of the newly organized Boston Artists' Association in 1845, the same year he died at the age of seventy-four.