Unknown, Portrait of Stuart Mollan, ca. 1820–30

Chicago:

Blythe Sobol, “Unknown, Portrait of Stuart Mollan, ca. 1820–30,” catalogue entry in Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan, The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, vol. 1, ed. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024), https://doi.org/10.37764/8322.5.3226.

MLA:

Sobol, Blythe. “Unknown, Portrait of Stuart Mollan, ca. 1820–30,” catalogue entry. Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, Blythe Sobol, and Maggie Keenan. The Starr Collection of Portrait Miniatures, 1500–1850: The Collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, edited by Aimee Marcereau DeGalan, vol. 1, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2024. doi: 10.37764/8322.5.3226.

At the time that this portrait miniature was donated by Joan Kent Dillon in 1999, it was thought to depict her ancestor Gabriel Furman (1756–1844), a New York assemblyman.¹ The identification posed a dilemma, however, as the painting’s style and the sitter’s clothing suggest a date of 1820–30, when Furman would have been at least sixty years old,² and the sitter appears to be decades younger. A pastel portrait of Furman by James Sharples (1751/2–1811) portrays Furman more plausibly as a man in his forties in 1798.³

Setting aside considerations of age and flattery, the sitters in the Nelson-Atkins miniature and the pastel by Sharples do not resemble one another. Both works once belonged to Dillon’s great aunt, Mrs. Helen Gillet (née Van Cortlandt Leroy Kent), who could trace her descent from her father’s mother’s line to Gabriel Furman. As so often happens, the sitter’s family lovingly preserved these heirlooms, but their identities became hazy over time.

The identification of the sitter in the present portrait was further complicated by the discovery of a calling card inside the miniature’s frame (Fig. 1). The card was inscribed “Mrs. Lorillard,” with a handwritten note identifying the sitter as “my uncle Stuart Mollan.” Tracing the family lineage back to Stuart Mollan (1803–1833) reveals that Mollan’s niece, Emily Taylor (1840–1925) married Pierre Allien Lorillard, thus plausibly identifying her as the “Mrs. Lorillard” of the calling card and our sitter as Stuart Mollan, a prosperous New York merchant and co-proprietor, with his father, of Stuart Mollan and Sons.⁴

Sadly, Mollan did not have long to live after this miniature was painted. While fugitive pigments may be partly to blame, its pale, greenish hues, particularly in his flesh tones, as well as his sober black attire, suggest that it could even have been painted after his death, to keep his memory alive for his grieving family. His obituary was recorded on April 1, 1833: “Yesterday, after a lingering illness, Stuart Mollan, Jr. [died] in the 27th year of his age.”⁵

Notes

1. Gabriel Furman has been described as “one of New York’s most eminent citizens in the latter part of the eighteenth century and early part of the nineteenth century.” Furman’s daughter Abigail Spicer Furman married John Treat Irving, the brother of the writer Washington Irving. Henry Collins Brown, ed., Valentine’s Manual of the City of New York (New York: Old Colony Press, 1917), 285.

2. In conversation with Elle Shushan and Carol Aiken, 2017; notes in NAMA curatorial files.

3. The pastel is not dated; however, it is part of a group of pastels by Sharples of Furman and his wife, daughter, and son, all of which are documented by Neil Jeffares, “Sharples, James,” Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800, online edition (Norwich: Unicorn Press, 2006), 8, https://web.archive.org/web/20240629184833/http://www.pastellists.com/Articles/Sharples.pdf. The portrait of his son, William Spicer Furman, is dated 1798. The portrait of Gabriel Furman could not be later than 1811, the year Sharples died, when Furman was fifty-two years old.

4. Catherine Hollister, ed., Manhattan New York City Directory: 1829–1830 (New York: Thomas Longworth, 1829), 406, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/a04bd020-973c-0136-7750-65cfeac8b95c. In 1845, the year before the death of Stuart Mollan’s father, he was described as a merchant “of Irish descent, and made his money as a merchant in the Dry Good line, at the south, and in this city. He is still purchasing goods for his different stores at the south”; Moses Yale Beach, Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of New York City, Comprising an Alphabetical Arrangement of Persons Estimated to the Worth $100,000, and Upwards (New York: The Sun Office, 1845), 20. The Mollan mercantile business is briefly discussed in Walter Barrett, The Old Merchants of New York City (New York: M. Doolady, 1870), 3:23, 144.

   Dillon donated another portrait miniature to the Nelson-Atkins in 1999 that also descended to her from the Lorillard family; see Unknown, Portrait of a Man, ca. 1795, https://www.nelson-atkins.org/starr/contents/Volume-1/American/Eighteenth-Century/F99-31-1-1-2/.

5. His father was indeed named Stuart J. Mollan (1773–1846); “Mortuary Notice,” Evening Post (New York), April 2, 1833, 2.

Probably commissioned by Stuart Mollan (1803–1833), New York, by 1833 [1];

Probably inherited by his sister, Eliza Mary Taylor (née Mollan, 1815–1867), New York, by 1846–1867 [2];

By descent to her daughter, Emily Lorillard (née Taylor, 1840–1925), Tuxedo Park, NY, 1867–1925 [3];

By descent to her niece, Helen Gillet (née Van Cortlandt Leroy Kent, 1879–1956), Beacon, NY, 1925–1956 [4];

By descent to her great-niece, Joan Kent Dillon (1925–2009), Chatham, MA, and Kansas City, MO, 1956–1999 [5];

Her gift to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 1999.

Notes

[1] Stuart Mollan died on March 31, 1833. “Mortuary Notice,” Evening Post (New York), April 2, 1833, 2.

[2] Mollan’s parents, Stuart J. Mollan (1773–1846) and Ann Jane Mollan (née Gallagher, 1775–1844) died in 1846 and 1844, respectively. If they were the original owners of the miniature, or inherited it after their son Stuart Mollan’s death, the next owner would have been their daughter Eliza, by the time of Mr. Mollan’s death in 1846.

[3] Emily Lorillard (née Taylor), niece of Stuart Mollan, is the “Mrs. Lorillard” whose name is inscribed on a calling card found tucked inside the miniature’s frame. She wrote above her name, “my uncle / Stuart Mollan,” identifying the sitter.

[4] The acquisition paperwork for this miniature records its provenance as “Mrs. Louis Gillette [sic] / By descent to Joan Dillon.” Mrs. Gillet was the great-aunt of the donor, Joan Kent Dillon. Acquisition Proposal, 1999, NAMA curatorial files.

[5] According to the acquisition paperwork, Joan Kent Dillon inherited the miniature upon her great-aunt’s death in 1956. Acquisition Proposal, 1999, NAMA curatorial files.