Junius Brutus Stearns (American, 1810-1885), "The Capture of Major John Andre", oil on canvas, signed and indistinctly dated lower left approximately 28 in. x 35 1/2 in., in a finely carved giltwood frame including liner with arched spandrels). E30000-50000 Provenance: Private collection, 1947, thence to Hendershott collection; Sotheby's, New York, September 14, 1995, lot 10. Note: The charming and popular British army officer John Andr‚ had been appointed in 1779 by Sir Henry Clinton, commander-in-chief of British forces in America (whose aide-de-camp he was) as deputy adjutant-general with the rank of major He was put in charge of undercover negotiations with General Benedict Arnold, a secretly loyalist American officer who was plotting a betrayal of the principal Revolutionary stronghold, the fortress of West Point (which he commanded) on the Hudson River. Andr‚ sailed upriver from New York for a clandestine rendezvous with Arnold, at Stony Point; but his British sloop, the Vulture, was forced to retire downstream before Andr‚ could reboard it, and he set off in civilian clothes to recross the lines. When he was within sight of the British outposts at Tarrytown, on the morning of September 23, 1780, he was detained by three militiamen: John Paulding, Isaac Van Wart, and David Williams. Stearns' dramatic painting shows the tense moment in which Williams (kneeling) has found the incriminating West Point plans in Andr‚'s boots; the officer proffers his gold watch and a monetary bribe to Paulding (the leader and hero of the incident), who refuses them. Andr‚ was turned over to General George Washington, who convened a military court at Tappan; the young agent was condemned to death as a spy, and was hanged on October 2, 1780. The British nation dedicated a monument to his memory in Westminster Abbey, to which his remains were transferred in 1821 (Winthrop Sargent, The Life and Career of Major John Andr‚, Natchez and New York, 1861). The understandably much less laudatory American view was that the serendipitous capture and execution of the spy Andr‚, and the defection of the traitor Arnold ( by averting an almost certain military catastrophe), marked one of the crucial turning-points in the War of Independence. The highly charged political and psychological drama of this pivotal encounter-in which the physically imposing Paulding, even if initially motivated perhaps by greed, emerges as an exemplar of patriotic ardor-thus exercised a continuing fascination for American artists. Thomas Sully (1783-1872) executed apparently the first major painting of this theme in 1812, in reaction to another tense moment in Anglo-American relations ( Worcester Art Museum, 22 « in. x 30 « in.); an even more influential treatment was offered in a rare history picture of c. 1835 by Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), in which Paulding's energetic pose is derived from the Apollo Belvedere (also Worcester Art Museum, 25 in. x 30 « in.). Stearns, in this largest and in many ways finest of this trio of masterworks, concentrates more tellingly on the taut eye-to-eye contact between Andr‚ and Paulson; Van Wart and Williams are much more successfully drawn into the tension of that clash of wills, as a contest of virtue. The superb mastery of line, tone, and color, bound together by Stearns' meticulous, glowing brushwork, makes this one of the most impressive of all 19th-c. American history paintings. If the somewhat unclear inscription is here correctly interpreted, Stearns apparently signed this early tour-de-force in the single year of his rank as an Associate of the National Academy, that is in 1848. We are indebted to Karen Mansfield, Assistant Registrar, Worcester Art Museum for her kind assistance.