Albert Gallatin Hoit (American, 1809-1856), "Daniel Webster (1782- 1852), as United States Senator (1827-1841)", c. 1836, oil and gouache on ivory, apparently unsigned, 5 « in. x 4 in., sight ( through original oval mount), in fitted case E2000-3000 Note: The great American statesman Daniel Webster (Class of 1801) and the miniature, portrait, and landscape painter Albert Hoit (Class of 1829) were both graduates of Dartmouth College, in their native New Hampshire; they may have met through the political career of the painter's father, Daniel Hoit, who served many terms in the state legislature, as well as one in its senate (Webster was a New Hampshire representative in 1813-1817, and served as counsel for Dartmouth College during the celebrated Supreme Court case in 1816-1819). This apparently uninscribed miniature certainly represents Webster-through its physiognomic identity with daguerreotypes by Mathew Brady (1845- 1849), as well as Southworth & Hawes (1851)-and it finds its closest parallel with an anonymous Metropolitan Museum of Art miniature, inscribed with Webster's name, which is dated stylistically to 1822- 1832. That New York miniature shows a somewhat lower hairline, and a slightly more youthful face; its costume and pose are virtually identical with this painting, and suggest that this four-times-larger "miniature" (almost at the size of a small easel painting) might well have been made only a few years later. In 1836 Webster ran as the Whig candidate for the Presidency; in that same year Hoit began to turn from his concentration on miniatures to portraits on canvas, and the conjunction of those facts suggests a plausible association of this painting with that year. In 1850 Hoit joined Webster at his home outside Boston, where he completed a full-length portrait for the New Hampshire State House (installed 1861; replica, Union League Club, New York). During those same sittings Hoit also made a series of bust- length Webster portraits (ink drawing, private collection; chromolithograph from that model, with intervening painting unlocated; canvas, Union League Club; canvas, private collection). The likenesses in those 1850 images are somewhat idealized, especially in the New Hampshire state portrait, in which Webster's appearance is close to that in the painting offered here; moreover, both the pose and costume of this portrait are identical to the 1851 daguerreotype by Southworth & Hawes. It is thus possible that this fine and mature masterwork might have been one of the fruits of Webster's 1850 sittings to Hoit- as an unusual, large, late miniature-rather than a work of the mid- 1830s.