Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790)

The Pastel: Sittings for Joseph Siffred Duplessis’s pastel of Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) may have taken place at the American diplomat’s temporary residence in Passy, between Paris and Versailles. Franklin is shown without a wig, seated at half-length, and wearing a simple gray coat.

The work was presented to the New York Public Library by John Bigelow in 1908. One of the library’s founders, Bigelow bought it in 1868, along with documents relating to its history of ownership. The agent was William Henry Huntington and the seller a Monsieur de Sénarmont. According to the documents, before Franklin departed for America in 1785, he presented the pastel to Louis Guillaume Le Veillard, mayor of Passy in the 1770s and a friend and neighbor with whom he played chess. Executed in 1794 during the exceptionally violent interval of the French Revolution known as the Terror, Le Veillard was survived by his wife and a daughter who died unmarried in 1834. Thereafter his estate passed through his cousin Marie to Amédée Hureau de Sénarmont and seems to have been dispersed in 1867 upon the death of the latter’s son Henry. The history of ownership is thus uninterrupted and indisputable.

An old label on the reverse dating the pastel to 1783 has proven to be incorrect. An X-radiograph of the 1778 oil painting owned by The Met demonstrates that the pastel precedes the painting and must date to 1777 (Franklin arrived in Paris in December 1776) or early 1778. The pastel is probably the earliest of the Franklin portraits made in France. It is of outstanding historical importance, even though it is “The Fur Collar Portrait” that has been imprinted upon the public imagination. The artist of both iconic images has been largely if not entirely unknown to the American public.

The Technique: Pastels, executed using simple sticks of color combining pigment, a white powdery mineral, and a gum binder, were prized in the eighteenth century.

This image of Franklin by Joseph Siffred Duplessis is the artist’s only known work in pastel, a medium employed almost exclusively for finished portraits, rarely for preparatory studies, such as this rendering. Although its immediacy and lack of finish evoke a sense of rapid execution, it is constructed according to customary procedures. Technical examination reveals that the artist worked up the composition directly, developing the preliminary stage of the likeness with a thin layer of green, carmine, and blue pastel. Building upon this foundation, he enriched the palette with a range of related tints. Next, with his fingers and a stump (a leather coil), he rubbed and intermixed the strokes. The facial features and details of the clothing were then delineated with the tips or broken edges of the color sticks.

Contemporary artists’ manuals describe various methods for the common practice of replicating a design. One likely used by Duplessis involved holding the framed and glazed composition to a window, applying thin paper to the glass, and tracing the contours in chalk.

A spirit of experimentation perhaps inspired Duplessis to use parchment (animal skin prepared with lime). The artist may have selected it knowing that its translucency when held to light would facilitate making copies; it also offered larger dimensions than handmade paper. The skin was tacked to a stretcher and the pastel was applied to its napped, or downy, side. Duplessis did not use a fixative, as such resins diminished the radiance of the light scattering from the surface of the innumerable powdery particles.