2. The Two-Dimensional Portraits in Context

Although Rimmer acted as an itinerant portrait painter part-time (before he became a physician), from 1841 to 1845 in Boston and the suburban areas of Randolph and Brockton, very few likenesses by him survive.¹ His portrait painting differs from his other work in that it is the part of his oeuvre done expressly for financial compensation, yet he did not support himself by it. All of his oil portraits that are known are included in this discussion. Human character did interest him, but, as a portraitist hired by a stranger, he was expected to restrain his judgment and imagination to copy what was before him and — in doubtless the most nettlesome challenge — try to flatter or please a paying sitter.² Of the ten known oil portraits, two are of his wife, one is of his sister (not illustrated because of repaint), and at least two are of friends.³

His earliest known likeness in oils, Portrait of a Young Man (fig. 10) depicts a bookish individual, with unnatural lighting used to complement an overall effect of mystery and self-absorption. Rimmer created it when he was either twenty-four or twenty-five. On the reverse is the artist’s signature and an 1841 date — the latter added perhaps in a different hand, yet there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the date.

Fig. 10 Portrait of a Young Man, 1841. Oil on canvas, 36 ½ x 29 ½ in. (92.70 x 74.93 cm). Foxboro Historical Society / Foxborough Historical Commission

The face is quite pale, with highlights on the eyes and nose, and with such delicate modeling in transparent shadows that it is relatively flat. Rimmer’s sensitivity to subtleties in value surely stemmed from his initial training in a print medium. Instead of striving for the decorative appeal of rich coloring or textured paint, the artist focused his attention on accurate drawing of the likeness. But there is also some sculptural quality to the face as he sought to describe what he was seeing. For instance, the philtral ridges on the sitter’s upper lip, possibly quite pronounced in the sitter, project convincingly and the lip is somewhat curled upwards.

The most sophisticated part of the picture is the artist’s response to subtle effects of light, based on close observation of details. For instance, the light on the sitter’s white collar reflects on his neck, and there is secondary or reflected light within the shadowed areas of his left cheek and his nose. Creating the sensation of a rounded object in space, there is light as well on the far side of his collar as if coming from behind. Then too, the skillful illumination of the foreground book helps it to project in a realistic way.

The hands in the portrait are another case of replicating what is seen. Rather than flattering to the sitter, they exhibit evidence of an inflammatory arthritis that resulted in a boutonnière deformity of the fingers.⁴ As a careful observer with the detached interest of a physician, Rimmer did not avoid representing an abnormality. Almost all other artists would have excluded the hands, especially in a commissioned portrait as this seems to be.

This sitter might have been a patient, perhaps even of Rimmer or of Dr. Kingman.⁵ As to his identity, the background is fairly elaborate with shorthand references to a theatrical connection, possibly a Boston theater. Shown as well-dressed, he sits at a desk with an open text and quill pens before him, seemingly on a stage with a balcony above and a stage curtain behind which is drawn back to reveal a moonlit landscape. Unfortunately, despite the visual hints — including a jeweled shirt stud — they are not sufficient to pinpoint a specific sitter’s identity.

As for the sitter’s stage affiliation, Rimmer himself had an enduring interest in theater and in amateur theatricals. When he could afford it in the late 1860s, he enjoyed watching Shakespearean plays in Boston.⁶ Even years earlier, as an undated portrait (fig. 11) implies, he and his wife shared an appreciation of theater or, more particularly, historical fantasy. Although the varnish on his wife’s picture has yellowed with age and grime, she is visible as wearing a sixteenth-century-derived dress with slashed sleeves and a narrow, jeweled bandeau above her forehead.⁷ Her clothing and hair style (with its ringlets and bun) date from the early to mid-1840s when there was a fashionable revival of the Tudor period. The pose of the head, between a three-quarter view and a profile, is one that Rimmer used repeatedly when it could be flattering to a woman. The more common angle for portraits was a three-quarter turn of the head that is closer to a frontal view, but — possibly because the profile was considered more revealing in terms of reading character — Rimmer used this compromise.⁸ His recorded interpretations of women’s profiles are too few and too brief to be of much help, but he preferred a straight nose and little or no ornament as in this instance of his wife.⁹

Fig. 11 Mary H.C. Peabody, Mrs. William Rimmer, early to mid 1840s. Oil on canvas, ca. 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm). Collection of Elizabeth Korndorffer

The needle packet in her hand suggests that she designed and made her own historicized outfit. Despite being unique, her dress reflects the aspirations of the Romantic period in its fanciful recreation of the past. In a similar way, the staircase behind, to the far right — offering ascent to another level — is doubtless a personal reference, but, without more of a hint, its message is unclear.¹⁰ The use of clues or symbols in this portrait and that of Portrait of a Young Man, to deepen the meaning of the picture, is characteristic of Rimmer’s work, especially outside of portraiture.

Such symbols, for example, convey most of the story in Rimmer’s historical genre scene, Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (fig. 12), which includes a portrait of Henry VIII. A stamp on the reverse, identifying a Boston canvas seller, helps to establish the date as about 1845.¹¹ Among Rimmer’s surviving work in oils, this scene is unique in being partly derived from an engraving after an oil painting. The original source is Francis I and His Sister Marguerite of Navarre (unlocated), by the English artist Richard Parkes Bonington, which was painted and engraved as an illustration (fig. 13) for Mary Shelley’s 1829 short story, “The False Rhyme.”¹² Rimmer’s Henry VIII assumes much of the body and clothing of his contemporary, Francis I, but with the gold-encrusted poniard turned so that it takes on a slightly erotic posture, befitting Henry’s position as an impassioned suitor. To those who know her fate, the picture refers obliquely to the death of Anne as queen (her beheading relates to that of Rimmer’s presumed ancestor Louis XVI). But the focus is on the first step in this direction, seduction by the devilishly red-clothed and charmingly flushed, all-attentive Henry. His face is roughly based on the likeness of Henry as a young man by Joos van Cleve (fig. 14), or a version derived from it. But Rimmer — in his first known historical portrait — has made the king’s blue eyes larger and more appealing as he fixes his gaze on Anne.

Fig. 12 Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, ca. 1845. Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in. (60.95 x 50.80 cm). Brigham Young University Museum of Art, gift of C. Joseph Bowdring in memory of John Castano, 1980

Fig. 13 Charles Heath after Richard Parkes Bonington, Francis the First and His Sister (detail), 1830. Engraving, sheet: 7 x 4 ½ in. (17.78 x 11.43 cm). British Museum, London. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_1878-0713-2733

Fig. 14 Joos van Cleve, Henry VIII, ca. 1530–35. Oil on panel, 28 ½ x 23 1/10 in. (72.1 x 59.2 cm). Royal Collection Trust, UK. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Henry_VIII_by_Joos_van_Cleve

Anne’s back is turned to the viewer with her face in shadow, so it is not possible to read her facial expression; yet she stops playing her lute and curtseys slightly as she moves away from Henry in an action recorded by her dress. The stopped music, discarded needlework, and draining hourglass are all signs of impermanence, but the hourglass more overtly symbolizes the approach of death. As it drains, her lifetime is shortened.

The other ominously foreshadowing elements are the deadly poniard and the faintly visible tapestry behind Henry’s head. On it is a crowned monarch seated on a canopied throne and accompanied by assistants. A woman (the previous queen?) is seen leaving as another woman — presumably Anne — is presented and kneels before the enthroned man. Outside the tapestry, a vertical post, continued by a twisted chair leg, divides the potential lovers and is possibly symbolic of their eventual separation.

The circumstances of Rimmer’s courtship picture are completely invented. Against expectation, there is no historical record or Shakespearean scene that fits it. But a portrayal of Anne as vulnerable and guileless is found in Shakespeare’s play, Henry VIII (co-written with John Fletcher) where she is a minor character who declares her desire not to be queen (Act 2, Scene 3).

As he did habitually, Rimmer invented figures for this picture just as he later worked from imagination on the classroom chalkboard which did not entail the careful study of a living subject. Like the Shakespearean pictures from The Tempest and Macbeth, this painting seems to have been sold or given away when the family lived in East Milton, Massachusetts, between 1855 and 1863.¹³ As the earlier, less personal Shakespeare-related subject, it conceivably differed from the others in being always intended for sale.

Returning to his wife as a sitter, the artist painted a second image of Mary Rimmer (figs. 15, 16) probably in the mid-1840s, without the fancy dress, background, or props of the first. Within an oval, which concentrates the focus, her head is shown in a standard three-quarter view as she looks at the viewer with a sentient connection. Compared to the frontal head in Portrait of a Young Man (fig. 10), her flesh color is warmer with a slight tinge of pink in the cheek and with darker shadows so that she is more three-dimensional but not strongly so. More than in most portraits, her eyes have a realistic glassy or liquid quality with a depth of coloring within the iris. In a similar, careful transcription that reveals his interest in underlying anatomy, Rimmer includes the jugular notch of her throat muscles as well.¹⁴ Overall, she is perhaps fantasized to some extent as a natural woman, with her hair let down and no ornamentation. This might be expected of a Quaker, but the effect is of greater naturalism than in the other portrait of her. She is also effectively timeless because of the dark wrap that covers most of her clothing.

Fig. 15 Mary H.C. Peabody, Mrs. William Rimmer, mid 1840s. Oil on canvas, 29 4/5 x 23 ½ in. (76.2 x 59.69 cm). Northeast Auctions, Portsmouth, NH

Fig. 16 Mary H.C. Peabody, Mrs. William Rimmer (detail)

In its stripped-down effect and inclusion within an oval, Mrs. Rimmer’s likeness is reminiscent of a lost portrait by Rimmer, known from a photograph (fig. 17). The sitter is a young woman from the mid-1840s with her hair collected in a bun, no jewelry and a profile that flatteringly recalls that of Greek classical sculpture. Establishing that this is the product of a commission, the painting’s wood stretcher bears the inscription: “By William Rimmer of Boston,” where he lived from 1843 to 1845.¹⁵

Fig. 17 Bust of a Woman, 1843–45. Oil on canvas, 24 x 20 in. (61 x 51 cm). Unlocated. Lincoln Kirstein and Richard Sherman Nutt Research Material on William Rimmer, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

Out of Rimmer’s known work, a couple of portraits and several other pieces show the effects of manic depression. He destroyed what he deemed inferior, but, in this beginning stage of his career, he also offered to paint portraits for between five and fifty dollars and to coordinate the price with the labor put into it.¹⁶ The wide disparity in pricing could be an admittance of his occasional inability to perform well. With such a range, he could accommodate a multitude of moods. Bartlett noted his unevenness and mentioned a Kingman family portrait (destroyed) of Dr. Kingman, his wife and four children that “not only lacks every merit desirable in a work of art, but it is as awkward in its arrangement as could well be imagined.”¹⁷

Bartlett described Rimmer as not a good colorist, having a “tendency towards yellows and browns” in his best pictures, while “the combinations are unpleasantly cold and inharmonious” in his worst. They could even be “morbid.”¹⁸ Contradicting these critiques, one student, who had Rimmer as a visiting instructor, called his pictures strikingly warm: his “color scheme was novel, flesh tints very red.”¹⁹ According to Bartlett, “many” observers thought him “afflicted with defective color-vision.”²⁰ Reflecting Rimmer’s inconsistency, newspaper accounts provide contradictory descriptions of his coloring in paintings, now missing, as “exquisite” in one case and “severely criticized” in another.²¹

Although much remains to be learned about how this illness affects the output of an artist, bipolar painters in a manic state tend to use brighter, warmer and more contrasting colors; the brushwork is also typically freer. In a depressed state, the artist often paints with darker, colder colors, less contrast, slower motion, and less imagination.²²

Rimmer’s portrait of Seth Turner, Jr. (fig. 18), from about 1840–1842, can possibly be understood within this context. Turner, a sergeant in the Massachusetts militia during the Revolutionary War, died at age eighty-six in 1842.²³ Every bit of Turner’s age seems to weigh on him as he sits, generally colorless, under an oppressive dark void. Like Portrait of a Young Man (fig. 10), this likeness breaks portrait conventions. Instead of flattering the sitter, it provides a clinical record of his physical and mental deterioration. Altogether, his haggard demeanor conveys deep depression. But this is not necessarily the sitter’s mood. This is the result of the artist’s choices and, because of how it is painted, it could reflect his own state of mind. He typically did not flatter through flesh coloring, but this deathly pallor seems to be extreme. Rimmer once said, in revealing the effect of depression on his sense of color, “Some people are like ashes in my eyes.”²⁴

Fig. 18 Seth Turner, Jr., ca. 1840–42. Oil on canvas, 35 ½ x 28 ½ in. (90.7 x 72.7 cm). Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society

The artist slowly and carefully copied details of his sitter, including the facial lines, the wart between the eyebrows, and the sheen on his hair and coat. Yet, in minor ways, the picture is left unfinished. The long, white hair is merely blocked in, as are parts of the face and collar, so it is possible to see bare patches of the underlying ground which is a pale grayish tan. By leaving visible gaps, Rimmer has progressed in a halting fashion, attentive to only certain parts of the picture and not to others. This apparent hesitancy is suggestive of depression.

Regrettably, the circumstances of the Turner portrait are not known. It does not appear to be based on a photograph, which usually would involve more confident modeling, nor is there a known photograph of the sitter for comparison. Granted, art is never a credible basis for a psychiatric diagnosis, but it often can be supporting evidence of an artist’s mood. Whatever the interaction between the painter and his subject, the overall effect of the picture is one of deep melancholy.

Another unfinished painting that shows signs of Rimmer’s illness is Samson and the Child (fig. 19). The incident shown is from Judges 16:23–27 where the blind Samson, whose cropped hair is beginning to grow back and renew his supernatural strength, is called from his prison to entertain his Philistine captors. As his enemies make sacrifices to their god, Dagon, Samson asks a child to lead him to the temple so he can touch the supporting pillars. The picture (which is signed although unfinished) dates stylistically from probably the mid-1850s, a time when Rimmer had an effortless mastery of human anatomy, as seen in a dated minor sketch (fig. 20). But — in front of a magically inventive balustrade — in an unexpectedly amateurish error, one of the child’s legs is noticeably shorter than the other. His flesh color also becomes an unnatural, bluish gray in the upraised arm and shortened leg.

Fig. 19 Samson and the Child, ca. 1854. Oil on canvas, 22 x 27 in. (55.90 x 68.58 cm). Private Collection. Image from Skinner Auctioneers (2004)

Fig. 20 Gloucester Shoreline with Mary Rimmer, 1855. Graphite pencil on paper, 5 1/16 x 7 in. (12.8 x 17.8 cm). Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum, Louise E. Bettens Fund. Photo © President and Fellows of Harvard College

It cannot be a coincidence that Rimmer’s sudden inability to gauge correctly the proportions of parts of a figure in relation to the whole appears sporadically in the work of other manic-depressive artists.²⁵ A good example is the bipolar English artist George Romney’s Horseman of Montecavallo (fig. 21), which is a drawing of a fourth-century statue in Rome. It shows a rear view of Castor — one of the mythological Dioscuri, the twin sons of Zeus — and his horse. The original is properly proportioned and naturalistic, and Romney was a highly skilled artist who could draw a horse from life with anatomical correctness. But, in the drawing, the copied horse has a radically shortened back, abbreviated rump, and shortened legs. That is, there is a disruption in Romney’s usual ability to conceive of the image as a whole.

Fig. 21 George Romney, Horseman of Montecavallo, (Roman Sketchbook), 1773-74. Graphite pencil on paper, 8 ¾ x 11 ¾ in. (22.5 x 30 cm). Courtesy of Cumbria Archive and Local Studies Library, Barrow-in-Furness

With Rimmer, this disproportion can be found in the woman’s enlarged, right foot in The Fireman’s Call (fig. 1). It also takes the form of an undersized arm in the foreground of the unidentified sitter in Seated Man (fig. 22).This drawing has a skillfully drawn head with sfumato shading in the face and highlights on the man’s curls which are created with clever economy by the paper beneath. Yet the crayon is used very differently at another time to sketch in the man’s body and a shrunken wicker chair. The style is looser with a new carelessness or inattention. Despite the dip in quality, Rimmer overlooked any lapse in that it is signed and dated 1856 as a finished work. It was meant to be displayed within an oval mount.²⁶

Fig. 22 Seated Man, 1856. Black crayon on brown wove paper. Sheet: 14 x 11 1/16 in. (35.5 x 28.1 cm), oval. Photography by Randy Dodson © Courtesy Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Another example of Rimmer’s passing inability to construct an ensemble with accuracy is when a student came upon him painting trees on a hillside, but perpendicular to the slant of the hill. On being asked whether trees grow that way, Rimmer “half-unconsciously replied, ‘I don’t know. Don’t they?’ as if his mind was occupied with matter beyond the present work.”²⁷

Puzzlingly, Rimmer exhibited a Cupid Relating His Adventures to Venus (lost), with anatomical defects, at DeVries’ Gallery in Boston in 1870 to scathing reviews. This was particularly wounding to Rimmer as the local authority on the correct depiction of human anatomy.²⁸ Only months earlier, another rendition, Venus Listening to Cupid’s Account of His Exploits (lost), sold in New York as a masterpiece for the extraordinary sum of $10,000 — more than Rimmer would ever earn again for a work of art.²⁹ With missing pictures that have never been photographed, it is impossible to know how much went wrong. Presumably the artist’s illness played a role in this inconsistency and in the fact that he would publicly display an inferior version. That is, other bipolar artists did the same. For instance, the English artist Benjamin Robert Haydon exhibited a large drawing of Adam and Eve in which one of Adam’s legs was too short. When criticized, Haydon said he thought the leg was nicely done in itself, so he kept it.³⁰

In an instructive comparison, Rimmer painted two quite different versions of a portrait of Abel Kingman, a former state senator and father of the physician who became Rimmer’s mentor.³¹ The earliest one, a bust portrait shown cropped (fig. 23), signed and dated 1846, has a later-repaired far eye and cheek and sufficient retouching so that it is not a wholly representative work. Nonetheless, it has the same relatively colorless flesh as in Portrait of a Young Man. Bartlett spoke of the head as “well constructed” and described its pale quality as “tender” flesh coloring.³²

Fig. 23 Abel Kingman (detail), 1846. Oil on muslin cloth backed by panel, 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm). Brockton Public Library, Brockton, MA

The second version (fig. 24) — a revised copy, with swarthy flesh — might have been painted at any time afterward but perhaps most likely at about the time of the sitter’s death in 1850.³³ In contrast with the first version, where the sitter smiles wanly at the viewer — with his glasses atop his head, covering a bald spot — in the second, the sitter is sterner and more upright as he gazes off into space, lost in thought. There is also a greater sense of latent energy in the enhanced coloring and modeling of his face. In what presents a challenge for the artist, the second version is also so much in shadow that it can be difficult to see the head convincingly as in the round. But Rimmer counters this effect by modeling much of the face in indirect or reflected light and separating the back of the head from the dark curtain by again deploying secondary lighting. The darkening of the skin and heavy shadowing all seem to have been calculated to make the burst of direct light on the sitter’s forehead more climactic.

Fig. 24 Abel Kingman, ca. 1850. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm). Collection of Pamela Post Ferrante

This small, impastoed spotlight must have special meaning and, as the sitter was a devout Christian, it is most persuasive as a biblical reference.³⁴ It could well refer to Isaiah 9:2, which predicts that the Messiah’s birth will cause a light to shine on those who dwell in darkness in “the shadow of death.”³⁵ It can probably be best understood as resulting from the presence of the Holy Spirit. The apparent spiritual emphasis and the lack of any change requiring another sitting suggest that Rimmer produced the revised version just before or after Kingman’s death.

In addition to implying the sitter’s spiritual state, the second portrait hints at the artist’s illness. Rimmer had difficulty in aligning the sitter’s ears or, again, relating a part to a larger whole. The near ear is abbreviated but correctly placed and recognizable at the right, whereas the far ear is barely indicated in Indian red and incorrectly positioned at the left, between the sitter’s cheekbone and the bottom of his mouth. It is less visible than it might be because it is part of seemingly a whimsical stroke on that side of the face that is close to the background color.³⁶

This anatomically inaccurate treatment of parts happens as well in Rimmer’s horse and cart inkstand (fig. 25), carved in soapstone, where the nostrils (fig. 26) are not aligned and the mane falls evenly on both sides of the horse’s neck but is treated differently on each side (figs. 25, 27). Indeed, the eye socket and nostril on the horse’s left side are more emotionally expressed than on the right.

Fig. 25 Inkstand with Horse Pulling a Stone-Laden Cart, 1855–63. Soapstone, 6 ¼ x 17 x 11 in. (15.87 x 43.20 x 27.94 cm). Collection of Middlebury College Museum of Art, Vermont. Purchase with funds provided by the Christian A. Johnson Memorial Fund, 1988.133

Fig. 26 Inkstand (detail) 1855-63

Fig. 27 Inkstand (detail) 1855-63

Returning to Kingman’s portrait, other American portraits of the period were generally more formulaic at mid-century. Kingman’s likeness is highly unusual in being dark, painterly and experimental. The most successful portrait painter at the time in the Boston area was the academy-trained Chester Harding (fig. 28).

Fig. 28 Chester Harding, Self-Portrait, ca. 1843. Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 7/8 in. (76.2 x 63 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Unlike Harding’s work, Rimmer’s picture is inspired by the shadowed portraits of the seventeenth-century Dutch master, Rembrandt — especially some of his etchings. But it differs in having carefully modeled details in off-white, rather than shade, against a dark, relatively flat area.

Rimmer’s Mrs. Robert Restiaux Kent (Eliza F. Watson) (fig. 29), from about 1865, is also concerned with the creative manipulation of light and shade. Perhaps his finest portrait, it is innovative in its inclusion of the sitter’s taste in music. Usually if a musical score is shown with a sitter, which is relatively rare, its title is indecipherable. Instead, this score is clearly for J.S. Bach’s Aria Suite No. 3, although Rimmer miscopied — or perhaps deliberately altered — the score slightly so that it is not an accurate depiction of the contrapuntal melodic line.

Fig. 29 Mrs. Robert Restiaux Kent (Eliza F. Watson), ca. 1865. Oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs. Richard B. Kent in the name of the late Henry Watson Kent. Photograph © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

The sitter holds a conductor’s baton and presents a full profile because of shadowing, but she is actually in the quasi-profile view that Rimmer favored. His interest in suggesting character through a side view relates to his categorizing of profiles for artistic purposes in his later book, Art Anatomy. Generally this section of the book follows mainstream stereotypes from the period with regard to gender, ethnicity, and race that would be offensive today, but it is far too short and unexplained to be a useable system. By chance, this sitter’s high-bridge nose — very slightly hooked — does appear in the text in a flattering way which would be reason to emphasize it. It is said to be of the kind “seldom found in a Face of the Animal Type.” This means it would not, by itself, be interpreted from a picture as the indication of moral weakness — quite the opposite.³⁷

Eliza Kent married a pharmacist in 1864 in the Boston suburb of Chelsea, where Rimmer lived from 1863 to 1866, and probably had her portrait painted in about 1865. The next year, the artist (who had already taught at the Lowell Institute in Boston and Harvard University in Cambridge) moved to New York to teach. He did return to Chelsea in the summers and then moved back in 1870, but an earlier date is probable.³⁸

According to Eliza Kent’s son, Rimmer felt a particular bond with Eliza (fourteen years younger) and her husband because of their mutual love of music. He would visit them expressly “for the music,” which must have involved his participation as well.³⁹ The artist, whose favorite composer was Beethoven, not only sang with a fine bass voice but he also composed and played on the piano, flute, and organ. In fact, during the late 1840s, he performed on the organ, trained a choir, and conducted music at a Catholic church (St. Mary’s) in Randolph.⁴⁰

The plan for the portrait almost certainly developed from Rimmer’s belief that music belonged to a spiritual life and revealed the inner self.⁴¹ His inclusion of a specific piece by Bach was a way to comment on the sitter’s taste, sensitivity, and spiritual awareness. That is, the picture goes beyond the visible — her appearance and action — to verify, through the abstract medium of music, that she is someone with inner beauty.⁴²

Another immaterial element, the lighting, is effective in almost the same way as the use of sound. A soft spotlight on Eliza Kent’s face with a slight murkiness to the surrounding air introduces a quality of quiet reflection and mystery that Rimmer seems to have preferred. This slightly darkened environment recalls Portrait of a Young Man and the now-discolored, early portrait of the artist’s wife in its evocation of atmosphere. However, more than in these precedents, Rimmer seems to have delighted in carefully contrived details of light and shadow. Examples include the tendrils of hair on her forehead which cast shadows, the sheen on her hair, the light on the turned-back page, sparkling highlights on the edges of her ruffled collar, and the vertical dash of light in a decorative indentation on the piano that calls attention to her hand. This last use of light serves a compositional function in moving the viewer’s eye, in a generally circular direction, and is echoed in the set of parallel lines in the wallpaper.

The artist was well aware that he could not capture this sense of a soulful presence in sculptured busts, which is one reason he was attracted to the medium of oil paint for portraits.⁴³ Not just with portraits but also with subject pictures, oil paint suited an artist who prioritized the stimulation of imagination.

Like the other undated portraits, Rimmer’s last known likeness in oils, Young Woman (fig. 30) has an assigned date — about 1870 — that is approximated from costuming and hairstyle. His youngest daughter, Caroline, owned it, but the picture does not resemble photographs of her and is probably of another family member.⁴⁴ It is smaller than the other oil portraits and, unlike them, simplified through the cloaking of large areas in shadow. Indeed, the shadowing is so heavy that this could well be an experimental, portrait study rather than a commissioned likeness. The famous precedent for this dark chiaroscuro with contrasting glitter, as in her tiara and the border of her dress, is the work of Rembrandt, such as in this Self-Portrait (fig. 31). Rembrandt had long inspired a renewal of interest among artists.

Fig. 30 Young Woman, ca. 1870. Oil on canvas, 21 x 17 in. (55.33 x 43.20 cm). Unlocated. Image: Jeffrey Weidman, et al, William Rimmer: A Yankee Michelangelo. Hanover, NH: Brockton Art Museum/Fuller Memorial, 1985, no. 32

Fig. 31 Rembrandt van Rijn, Self-Portrait with Shaded Eyes, 1634. Oil on panel, 28 x 22 in. (71.1 x 56 cm). The Leiden Collection, New York, NY. https://www.theleidencollection.com/viewer/self-portrait-with-shaded-eyes

But Rimmer had already moved in this direction earlier, in a less derivative way, in his first known work in oil, Portrait of a Young Man (fig. 10). That is, like many painters historically, he adopted the effect of a turgid, mysterious atmosphere so that it became characteristic of him. He recommended to students, much later, “that impalpable something which we feel but do not see, which softens every defect, and throws over everything a thin, transparent veil.”⁴⁵ This elusive quality is in the background alone in the earlier work. Closer to Rembrandt, the later portrait envelops the head in darkness. This kind of painting in Young Woman is completely unlike many of Rimmer’s classroom drawings that are dependent on lines, but he also taught his students how to soften edges or make “outlines obscure.”⁴⁶

In the blanket shading or masses of shadow, the portrait also relates to some subject pictures by Rimmer’s friend, William Morris Hunt. But the connection is less true with Hunt’s portraits, such as Study of a Female Head (fig. 32) which incorporates minor shadowing over the visible eye and lighter shading below. Furthermore, the touches of highlight in Rimmer’s portrait bring it closer to Rembrandt’s work. Hunt, a painter then known best for portraits, and Rimmer sometimes shared pupils who compared them. One of them reported that Hunt, in about 1874, was markedly different because of his generalized drawing “by masses.”⁴⁷

Fig. 32 William Morris Hunt, Study of a Female Head, ca. 1872, oil on canvas, 23 15/16 x 18 in. (60.8 x 45.7 cm), Brooklyn Museum, John B. Woodward Memorial Fund

So much descriptive detail in Young Woman has been eliminated that the fact that the sitter turns her head, with shoulders at an angle, so that there is some action is nearly the sole indication of any characterization. Her posture assumes importance when dealing with a specialist in the expressive possibilities of human anatomy. Rimmer wrote that “when the features are latent,” as when little is revealed, “the expression may in some degree receive direction from the action of the body.”⁴⁸ Her mere turning suggests vitality, especially in this unusual pose. In Rimmer’s terms, her subtle smile and eyes enlarged by shadows are also indicative of sensitivity and intelligence.⁴⁹ Instead of acknowledging the viewer as Eliza Kent did, she looks beyond and, with the obscuring of her features, is evasive and perhaps soulful. Despite the gaze disconnected from the viewer, this portrait conveys the presence of someone with unmistakable sentience. Rimmer’s heads that look at the viewer have this same quality, but it is more easily obtained. That Rimmer’s surviving portraits are so diverse makes clear his tendency — carried throughout his work — to challenge himself and experiment.

When the Civil War began with the attack on Fort Sumter in South Carolina, April 12, 1861, Rimmer, at age forty-five, was occupied with completing his heroic, life-size sculpture, Falling Gladiator. Although he did not publicly engage in politics, he was a Republican who supported Lincoln and, after the four-year war, he continued to support the policies of the Abolitionists, particularly those of Massachusetts’ Senator Charles Sumner.⁵⁰

One potential Civil War portrait stems from the unusual presence of black volunteer troops in Boston under the white Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, a Boston Abolitionist. Seizing the occasion, Rimmer sketched a likeness in pencil of a black soldier with large eyes, a kindly expression, a hopeful upward look, and a forward shoulder in Heads of Soldiers (fig. 33). Whether his subject was a real person or not is unknown, but the inspiration for the drawing is apparently in his circumstances, in his grouping with other recruits. They hold rifles and — with their heads lined up — present different overlapping profiles, suggestive of diversity in race and personality. The point, in reference to a real event, appears to be that the foreground soldier is enthusiastically joining other volunteers — black and white — in marching to war as part of a united effort. From the visual evidence, the alternative, that he is shown in an all-black regiment that is so abbreviated as to eliminate skin color, is unlikely.⁵¹ Thus, fairly clearly, this is fiction because the actual regiment was black. But the drawing is symbolic of the Abolitionists’ hoped-for racial unity in this fight for one cause. Solidarity is the message.

Fig. 33 Heads of Soldiers, probably 1863. Graphite pencil on paper, 7 x 10 in. (17.85 x 25.40 cm). Unlocated. Image from glass plate negative. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Related to this effort, Rimmer created clay sketches or preliminary mock-ups (lost) for sculptures that were more “personal” than his drawings and, according to Bartlett, “pathetic in their rendering of the painful condition of the negro in the War for the Union.”⁵² Evidently the loss of these sketches removes a record of Rimmer’s empathy for the American slave.

While other artists painted, drew and sculpted images of the soldiers or of recent battles, Rimmer took a different and more inventive tack. For him, this war, concerning the timeless question of slavery, was epic, and its visual representation had to be allegorical. Mere illustration of war would not be to treat the situation in an art form. In one of his art anatomy lectures, he warned: “In giving great prominence to action and emotion, in whatever particular, we approach the sensational, the sphere of actual events, where art is unknown.”⁵³ The work of art had to be filtered or altered through the artist’s contribution — a use of the imagination. Just as he recontextualized parts of scenes by Bonington and Shakespeare, he reconceived an actual event in metaphorical terms. In this, he followed his advice to students “to know nature, but to rely upon knowledge and imagination in the execution of a work.”⁵⁴

One of Rimmer’s earliest Civil War images, from 1862, uses this metaphorical approach and is a drawing of two symbolic combatants, Secessia and Columbia (fig. 34), representing Secession and the Union. While “Columbia had been a substitute name for the United States, the term, “Secessia,” by 1862, referred to the South.⁵⁵ With minimal drapery, Secessia has the bearded and mustached head that Rimmer used elsewhere for a Northern European or Goth type; Columbia, in Roman gladiatorial attire, being less barbarous, adopts a classical profile.⁵⁶ This is an example of his typing for the purpose of enhanced clarity.

Fig. 34 Secessia and Columbia, 1862. Graphite pencil on paper, sheet: 17 3/8 x 24 in. (44.1 x 61 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Mrs. Henry Simonds. Photograph © 2022 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Rimmer’s conception, used as the basis for a photograph to be sold to raise money for the Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Regiments of Massachusetts Volunteers (both African American regiments), was so original with its invented characters that it was initially misunderstood. The American public was not used to allegory, other than in a political cartoon where figures might wear explanatory signs. One reviewer, who saw the picture at Williams & Everett’s art gallery in Boston in 1863, recognized that this was a mythic battle between good and evil but assumed it showed Great Heart fighting Giant Grim from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The scene is so epic that even after being corrected, this journalist found it highly effective with either explanation.⁵⁷

To commemorate the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, which was unique in being the first federally-recognized, African American regiment, Rimmer created not only Heads of Soldiers but also another war-themed, allegorical drawing (fig. 35).⁵⁸ It too was exhibited at Williams & Everett in 1863, but a couple of months before Secessia and Columbia, and with the same intention that it be photographed for the war effort, with a portion of the sale receipts destined for the regiment. The Abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator described it as “The Dawn of Liberty” and hailed it as being “prescient” in recognizing in its design “not only a numerical addition to our forces, but the advent of a new reign of Justice, which will give moral vigor to our consciences, and new courage to our hearts.”⁵⁹

Fig. 35 Dedicated to the 54th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, 1863. Graphite on paper, 17 ½ x 24 ½ in. (44.45 x 62.20 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

In the foreground, four members of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment are presented symbolically as Roman gladiators, without the irrelevance of faces, in a timeless fight against pure evil. They have the muscular backs that Rimmer so often drew in his anatomy class, and they perform as a striding, powerful, fearless unit. As one published account interprets it, with uplifted spears, they take “the solemn pledge of eternal warfare” against the huge monster of slavery before them, who sprawls in dominating fashion on a chained victim, surely a woman. While the hideous creature, upon seeing the warriors, starts “to rise again” from beneath a wilting palmetto (symbol of South Carolina), the rising sun illuminates Justice with her balanced scale.⁶⁰

With regard to its exhibition, this drawing superseded Secessia and Columbia because it referred to a recent occurrence, the mustering of these troops. As Bartlett noted, the work is rare within Rimmer’s oeuvre in being one of the few that deals with current events.⁶¹

About two weeks after the last published notice of this drawing, the regiment departed for Charleston, South Carolina on May 28, 1863. This particular regiment of black volunteers and their leader, Robert Shaw, are famous for having been exceptionally heroic in battle in Charleston. In a seemingly suicidal mission that resulted in the death of hundreds of soldiers, including Shaw, they stormed the walls of Fort Wagner, one of the Confederate forts protecting the city’s harbor.

More than a decade later in 1884, on commission to commemorate Shaw and the Fifty-Fourth Regiment, Augustus Saint-Gaudens produced a naturalistic, high-relief sculpture, just below life-size, that was cast in bronze as the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial (fig. 36). Unlike Rimmer’s allegorical representation, it is completely based on live models (and photographs of Shaw) to recreate the effect of the soldiers marching from Boston. The final result shows Shaw mounted at foreground center. All the soldiers’ heads are individualized in a convincing re-enactment except for the symbolic figure above with a laurel branch for victory and poppies for death.⁶²

Fig. 36 Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, 1897. Bronze, 11 x 14 ft. (3.4 x 4.3 m). Boston Common, Boston, MA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gould_Shaw_Memorial#/media/File:Robert_Gould_Shaw_Memorial_(36053)

In contrast, Rimmer’s small drawing of an idealistic march to war does not feature a white leader on horseback. Evidently representing an Abolitionist viewpoint, his nearly identical figures seen from the back reject any military or racial hierarchy. Instead, through association, their action is shown to be of the quality of the greatest heroes of antiquity.

In a letter of 1862, Rimmer wrote of the act of drawing the exterior of a human being as playing with an “infinite surface over the finite depth below.”⁶³ By infinite, he meant a surface in movement: the face or body of a living, breathing person. In his Art Anatomy, he pondered how to represent that depth below when it had a spiritual quality and concluded that no head is “so finely formed” that it represents “only the Spiritual.” Rather, “many forms are possible — as many as there are intellectual graces or physical beauties.”⁶⁴

The letter continued that “Any mechanic may make a manakin [sic]. Any surgeon may learn the parts of the human person — but he who would become an artist enters upon a wider field — the discovery through the [subject of a human being] of the strength of his own intelligence and the sensitiveness of his own perceptions.”⁶⁵ For Rimmer, the creation of art was, above all, a challenging act of perception and self-expression.

With this emphasis on the artist’s self, inevitably Rimmer had his own idiosyncratic manner as a portraitist. The deformed fingers, the depressed sitter, the spiritual spotlight, the portrait that incorporates music but eclipses half the face, and the shadowed head with sentience suggested by a tilted neck are indicative of an artist who — despite the expectations of his profession — managed to avoid providing a formulaic result. From what remains, it is clear that — against the more decorative aspects of much of the competition — the merits of Rimmer’s portraits in oils were not those of a kind to win broad public appeal.

Characteristically, he persevered on his own path and, unlike most competitors, often sought mysterious effects in light and shadow. The hinting and obscuring in Mrs. Kent’s picture and others suggested that a sitter has an elusive identity that involves more than what can be seen. The possibility of suggesting an immaterial reality certainly attracted Rimmer. To the extent that portrait painting could go beyond copying and involve the imagination, Rimmer thought the practice “susceptible of the highest artistic excellence.”⁶⁶