John Parker, Sr
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A Library The Boston Letter from Athenteum No. 108 JUNE 1995 The Parkers of Parker Hill WO portraits of great artistic and historic importance, on extended loan to the Athenreum, have recently been given to the co1lvction by Suzannah C. Ames. Both are Parker family portraits, father and son: John Parker, Sr. (1757-1840), by Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828); and John Parker, Jr. (1783-1844), by Chester Harding ( 1792-1886). They are joined by a full-length silhouette of John Parker, Sr., "cut without his knowledge by Mr. Brown while at Providence in 1833," and presented by George Parker to his brother, John Parker, Jr., the subject of Harding's portrait; a fire bucket which belonged to still another brother, Peter Parker (1759-1832); and other material related to the family. Curator of Collections Michael Wentworth has provided Items with one of his customarily erudite pieces on the portraits, and we are also fortunate that Athenreum member Richard Heath, Executive Director of GreenS pace Alliance, and Jamaica Plain historian, has been willing to contribute some fascinating historical commentary about Parker Hill, na1ned for the Parker family whose two illustrious members are the subjects of the paintings. Gilbert Stuart took up permanent residence in Boston in 1805 after testing the waters of patronage in Washington and Philadelphia. Already the foremost portrait painter in America, he was armed with a fluid technique and a European reputation that made him irresistible to the nascent Brahmin society of the town, and commis sions rained down upon him. A dilatory approach to their execution can only have increased the desirability of his portraits, and if his approach was casual his tech nique was rapid, and for the next twenty-five years he filled the drawing rooms of Federal Boston with silkily flattering portraits which balanced equally as status symbols and works of art. Stuart's portrait of John Parker, Sr., must have been painted about 1810. It was GILBERT STUART (1755- 1828) John Parker, Sr. (1757-1840), c. 1810 Oil on panel, 29 1~ x 24 in. Gift of Suzannah C. Ames, 1995 CHESTER HARDING ( 1792-1886) John Parker, Jr. ( 1783-1844), c. 1830 Oil on panel, 30 x 24 in. Gift of Suzannah C. Ames, 199 5 4~ inherited by his daughter Elizabeth Parker (Mrs. William) Shimmin (1787-1872), and passed to her son Charles Franklin Shimmin (1821-1891) and then to his widow, who died in 1903. It became the property of Charles Shimmin's daughter Blanche Shimmin (1849-1912), who bequeathed it to John Harleston Parker (1872-1930), a grandson of the sitter, and to another John Harleston Parker (1907- 1968), passing to his widow, now Mrs. James Barr Ames. Like many of Stuart's Boston portraits, it was included in the great benefit memorial exhibition held at the Athenreum in 1828 for the painter's impoverished family, where it figured as number 202, John Parker, Esq. The success of Chester Harding in Boston duplicated that of Gilbert Stuart, who he replaced as the most fashionable portraitist in the town. Born in New Hampshire and beginning his career as an itinerant artist, his early training came from the intel ligent mimicry of more accomplished painters. Any deficiency in this educational system was soon corrected by two years in London, where he perfected his tech nique and gained a fashionable reputation in the bargain, finally having to refuse all but royal commissions in order to attend to his studies. Back in Boston in 1826, he succeeded to Stuart's position-a state of affairs the latter described with a glimmer of distaste as "Harding fever" -and his portraits acceded to the cachet enjoyed by Stuart's a generation earlier. His portrait of John Parker, Jr., can be dated on the evidence of the costume to about 1830. Although its provenance is not as clear as that for Stuart's portrait of John Parker, Sr., it may well be identical. The obvious artistic interest of the two portraits aside, they are works of great local interest. When Stuart painted John Parker, Sr., the sitter was a successful mer chant whose Federal mansion in Roxbury stood on the southern slope of what the Puritans had known as Great Hill, although his contemporaries had long since called it Parker Hill, as we do today. John Parker's great grandfather, Nathaniel Parker ( 1670-174 7), had come to Roxbury from Dedham (where the family had been established by the immigrant Samuel Parker in the 1630s) and two generations later the family came into possession of a large part of Great Hill in 17 52, through the marriage of his father, Peter Parker (1720-1765), to Sarah Ruggles (1732-1802), an heiress (the importance of whose family was memorialized, in a way, by a subway stop on the Orange Line), who brought her father's pasture land and orchards on Great Hill with her to the match. Peter Parker pressed his newly acquired apples for cider, which he sold in Roxbury town center, and prospered. Rising gently through designations in various legal documents as a yeoman or cordwainer to that of gentleman, he died possessed of an estate valued at nearly £750, which included a "Mansion House & Barn with 5 acres of land adjoining, the Mowing pasture & Orchard on the Great Hill, being 29 Acres, 3~ Acres of Salt Marsh, Six Acres of Woodland in Newton, [and] A Dwelling House & other Buildings with 4~ Acres of land in Brookline." His eldest son, the John Parker of the Stuart portrait, also began his career without undue fuss, as an apprentice baker opposite Roxbury First ~5 Church. He prospered as a food broker and at the time of his death in 1840 owned four stores on Long Wharf and three in State Street near India Wharf, as well as the land on Great Hill that had come to him from his parents. His son, the John Parker of the Harding portrait, made an advantageous marriage with Anna Sargent ( 1783- 1873), the daughter of Epes and Dorcas Sargent of Gloucester, but died childless when the estate passed to his brother. In 1873 one of John Parker, Sr.'s, grandsons granted the city of Boston four and a half acres for a reservoir on top of the hill; four years later Parker Hill Avenue was laid out through the estate, and in 1884, as the community around hitn changed rapidly into a factory district, his son, John Harleston Parker, the eldest grandson of John Parker and great-grandson of Peter and Sarah Ruggles Parker, sold what remained of the estate to developers. In 1912, as the city of Boston considered plans to build a public swimming pool on the site of the redundant reservoir, the trustees of the Robert Bent Brigham hospital acquired three acres of former Parker land ad joining the reservoir to erect a chronic disease hospital designed and built by Shepley, Rutan, and Coolidge between 1912 and 1914. Other Parker land, on which the Parker mansion still stood, was sold to the city in 1925 by former governor Eugene N. Foss, who had acquired it on speculation in 1909. In 1931 plans were drawn up by the Boston City Parks Department for Parker Hill (now McLaughlin) playground on the site of the Ruggles apple orchard. Today the playground constitutes three of five artificially made terraces ascending up Parker Hill A venue from Parker Street. The fifth, owned by New England Baptist Hospital, still encompasses the panoramic view sweeping from the harbor islands to the Great Blue Hill. The early Parkers could hardly have predicted the changes made by the relentless hand of twentieth-century man, but the spectacular topography of the place would still bring them up short with a familiar delight in the unchanging beauty of the view. Lina Coffey Joins the Front Desk Staff ... The new face at the Front Desk belongs to Lina Coffey, who will be assisting Jim Feeney in ministering to the reading needs of Athenreum readers and staff. Lina has been a member of the Athenreum for three years, and comes to the library from Boston University, where she worked in the Reference Department. Readers now have the distinct advantage of having an additional reference librarian on the first floor, in addition to the regular cre'vv on four, and also one who is familiar with most Athenreum peculiarities. Lina received her degree in library science from C.W. Post University on Long Island, and now makes her home in Brookline. Her reading interests are "eclectic" (in her own words), so if readers find themselves at a loss for what to read, she will be a perfect guide. 6~ ... While Eric Tourian Revisits the Confederate Collection Eric Tourian, who as a student intern from Northeastern University served the Athenreum at the Security Desk and in the Reference Department, has joined the staff to work on an ambitious project linked to the conversion of all library holdings to machine readable form. For many years Marjorie Lyle Crandall's Confederate imprints and Richard Harwell's supplement More Confederate imprints were the standard bibliographic reference sources for publications of the Confederacy. Now Crandall and Harwell have been superseded by Confederate Imprints: A Bibliogra phy of Southern Publications from Secession to Surrender, by T. Michael Parrish and Robert M. Willingham, Jr. Eric's project, and it is an important one, involves converting the call marks assigned to the Athenreum's considerable holdings of Confederate material from Crandall numbers to Parrish and Willingham numbers, a project that will enable the Cataloguing Department to enter the library's Con federate holdings directly into a master data base after the Athenreum collections are converted to machine readable form-a major project which began earlier this year.