Talk:Benjamin Tappan

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The portrait on this page isn't the Benjamin Tappan of this page

Latest comment: 3 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

The Gilbert Stuart portrait displayed on this page is not a picture of the article's subject, Benjamin Tappan (1773-1857), U.S. senator from Ohio and holder of various other offices. It's a picture of his father, Benjamin Tappan (1747-1831).

To start with, it's pretty obviously not a picture of a 41-year-old man. People's faces did tend to age faster back then than they do now, but this portrait is much more plausible as a picture of a man in his late sixties.

But in fact we don't have to guess. First, the page at the National Gallery of Art for this Gilbert Stuart painting makes it entirely clear, in its "Provenance" section, which Benjamin Tappan is depicted. The first owner listed is "The sitter's son, Lewis Tappan [1788-1873]". Lewis Tappan (who has his own Wikipedia page) was, as this Wikipedia page notes, a brother of this page's subject. Benjamin Tappan the U.S. Senator had no son named Lewis.

Second, a couple of images of the Benjamin Tappan of this article do in fact exist, and they make it clear that he didn't particularly resemble his father. The best is an 1839 watercolor by Washington Blanchard, at the National Portrait Gallery, here: https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.98.78. It's labelled "CC0", so someone more ept than me at editing Wikipedia pages could presumably swap it into this page.

As this article notes, the Benjamin Tappan of this page did in fact study painting with Gilbert Stuart in his youth, so it's probably not a coincidence that Stuart (or, at least, Stuart's workshop) produced portraits of both his father and his mother. (The Stuart portrait of Sarah Holmes Tappan can be seen at https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.52388.html. Her birth surname is given as "Homes" in this article, but in fact it was spelled Holmes as often as Homes in multiple generations of her family.) pnh (talk) 10:40, 9 May 2021 (UTC)Reply

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