Stephen Elmer, A.R.A. British, 1717-1796), "The Politician: Dr. Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)", oil on canvas, signed and dated "1780" lower right, 30 in. x 25 in. E50000-100000 Provenance: The artist; by inheritance to his nephew, William Elmer, 1796; offered by him for sale at "Elmer's Sportsman's Exhibition", Haymarket, London, 1799 (as "The Politician--an old man reading news, kit-cat size, thirty guineas"). William H. Huntington, New York; donated by him to Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1885 (with Huntington Collection to storage, 1906), deaccessioned 1956; purchased by Prosper Guerry; by inheritance by George P. Guerry; purchased from him by Edward Eberstadt & Sons, New York, before 1962. Kennedy Galleries, New York, later 1960s; Private collection. Published: This painting engraved by Thomas Ryder (British, 1746-1810), as "The Politician/Published as the Act directs May 1, 1782, by T. Ryder and Sold by A. Torre and J. Thane No. 28 Hay Market [London." Second version of that 1782 engraving of this painting published as frontispiece to The Life and Works of Benjamin Franklin, Bungay Brightley and Childs, London, 1815. Original plate of that 1782 engraving of this painting republished by Z. Sweet, London, July 1, 1824, with augmented title, as "The Politician/[Dr. Benj: Franklin" Note: The septuagenarian sitter in this fascinating image holds in his right hand a copy of the standard London newspaper, the Evening Post; on the evidence of Ryder's careful engraving of this picture just two years after its creation, the paper must once have borne a faint but legible date of "Jan. 1, 1776" (Sellers, pp. 278-279 . The subject's left fist is clenched (as if in an approving gesture, almost of table-thumping agreement), over a 1776 pro-American pamphlet a copy of which Joseph Priestley had sent to Franklin on February 13th of that year-by Richard Price, Observations / on the Nature of / Civil Liberty, / the Principles of / Government, / and the / Justice and Policy / of the War with America (T. Cadell, London, February 8, 1776) "Old Elmer", as this presumably Tory painter of still life and hunting trophies, a member of the Society of Artists, and an A. R. A. a resident of both London and Farnham, in Surrey) was called by his contemporaries, had shown an apparently related (but untraced) painting of "A Politician" in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1777. That unknown likeness, as Sellers suggests, probably set out to satirize Franklin, as a Loyalist response to the widespread adulation engendered by a laudatory bronze medal of the patriot, which had been anonymously issued earlier that year. This three-year-later "Politician" by Elmer, by incorporating the same newspaper and pamphlet of January and February 1776, that had been topical when that late 1776 or early 1777 predecessor to this picture had been painted, implies that interest in his perhaps hastily-painted first canvas ( which, possibly for that reason, had not been engraved) caused Elmer to create this more serious picture, probably with a predetermined intent to engrave it, and as a result very probably taking more time and care over its artistic character and composition. As Sellers has remarked, this image seems likely to be a revision of a famous 1766 painting of "Franklin Seated at a Desk, Reading Documents and Books", by David Martin, that had become so popular as to be frequently replicated (versions now in the White House, American Philosophical Society, and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as well as in the collections of Lord Stanhope and the Earl of Yarborough). Elmer's immediate model for this head is likely to have been either the engraved profile frontispiece in Franklin's own Political, Miscellaneous and Philosophical Pieces (Benjamin Vaughan ed., J. Johnson, London, 1779), or even more plausibly the similarly-posed engraving which accompanied a sharply critical article on the "Life and Character of Dr. Franklin" in the Political Magazine and Parliamentary, Naval and Literary Journal of October 1780. Without quite overstepping the bounds of decorum, this somewhat daring picture clearly seeks to represent the transatlantically popular Franklin (as the Political Magazine's essayist accused) as the "mischie[vous author and encourager of the American rebellion," especially after he "came to be noticed as a politician." Its likeness seems to hover on the threshold of satire, and (because of the risk of seeming, however tangentially, to celebrate an "incendiary" patriot) was not even explicitly acknowledged as depicting Franklin at all, until almost two decades after Elmer's death-when its engraving was unambiguously included as the frontispiece to the major Franklin monograph of 1815 ( and was eventually re-engraved, with Franklin's name, in 1824). As Charles Coleman Sellers commented in his essential study of this image however (pp. 278, 280), "No denial of this acceptance of the likeness as Franklin's, within the lifetime of many who had known him, was ever made. That [its intention was to satirize seems certain, and that a picture so conceived could be reissued posthumously in its subject's honor throws a new light on the invulnerability of Franklin's fame." Reference: Charles Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1962; this painting reproduced on plate 13, with text on pp. 227-281; this book will accompany the lot.