Dressed to Kill, Dressed to Till
Oil on canvas, 22 1/4 x 17 1/2 inches; signed ‘G. Cooke’ on lower left corner, in carved, gilt, period frame. Stephen Girard (1750-1831), an expatriate Frenchman, was by 1810 Philadelphia’s wealthiest citizen and one of its greatest benefactors, making charitable contributions to numerous civic causes, from the care of orphaned children, to public education. Stephen Girard’s likeness has been perpetuated on bank notes and in history books by engravings made from a post-mortem portrait by Bass Otis. Done from personal recollection and a death mask, its shows the financier-philanthropist as he appeared in later life, with bald pate and blind right eye. This little-known life portrait by Maryland-born artist George Cooke was probably done in the mid-1820s. Girard’s facial features in this portrait compare favorably with those in Otis’s later work, but Girard is wearing a short wig, or "toupee, " to hide his baldness, although his blind eye is still apparent. Beneath his tailcoat he wears a plaid waistcoat, just coming into fashion for me before the time of his death. Cooke was an itinerant portrait and landscape painter, mostly working in Virginia and Washington, DC (where he studied briefly under Charles Bird King). After a six-year study tour of Europe, he returned to the United States and exhibited with success. He traveled throughout the South, primarily Virginia, Alabama, and Georgia, and although his mainstay of employment was portraiture, he produced some highly accomplished landscape and history paintings. Provenance: purchased prior to 1956 in Richmond, Virginia, by the Patton family of Tulsa, Oklahoma; from thence to Neal Auctions, 16 April 2011, where purchased. Original correspondence and photographs, an early 19th engraving of the Otis portrait of Girard, and a conservation report accompany the painting.
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