A Military Officer

(André E. Rueff, Brooklyn, N.Y.); sold 5 January 1924 through (Art House, Inc., New York) to Thomas B. Clarke [1848-1931], New York;[1] his estate; sold as part of the Clarke collection 29 January 1936, through (M. Knoedler & Co., New York), to The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh; gift 1947 to NGA. [1] Letter from André Rueff, 5 January 1924, to C. J. Dearden, President of Art House (Clarke files, in NGA curatorial files). The name of the seller and the date of purchase are also recorded in a copy of _Portraits by Early American Artists of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries Collected by Thomas B. Clarke_ (Philadelphia, 1928) annotated with information from files of M. Knoedler & Co., NY (copy in NGA curatorial records and in NGA library). According to the provenance provided by Rueff, which lacks documentation, the portrait was given by the sitter to a Colonel Thayer of the British army and later descended in the Adair family, including Esther Latham Adair, Alice Adair, James Adair (d. 1914), and his brother William of Jersey City, from whom Rueff acquired it. Confirmation of this provenance has not been possible. Lawrence Park, _Joseph Blackburn, A Colonial Portrait Painter, with a Descriptive List of his Works_, Worcester, Massachusetts, 1923: 6, noted that the portrait had come "to light about two years ago." John Hill Morgan and Henry Wilder Foote, _An Extension of Lawrence Park's Descriptive List of the Work of Joseph Blackburn_, Worcester, MA, 1937: 48, wrote that William Adair, of 34 Grant Avenue, Jersey City, said that he was a descendant of an Adair family of Boston, from whom he inherited the portrait. The only part of the story that can be documented is that William Adair lived at the Grant Avenue address; see _R. L. Polk and Co.'s Jersey City Directory, 1925-1926_.

lower left on painted spandrel: I Blackburn Pinxt 1756.