Scientist of the Day - Joseph Duplessis
Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, oil on canvas, by Joseph Duplessis, after 1779, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. (npg.si.edu)
Joseph-Siffred Duplessis, a French portrait painter, was born Sep. 22, 1725, in Carpentras, in southeast France. After study in Rome, he moved to Paris when he was 27, and over the course of the next 30 years, he gradually rose through the hierarchy, was accepted in 1769 into the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and became a highly acclaimed painter of portraits. We are interested in only one of these, his portrait of Benjamin Franklin. Or should we say, portraits.
Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, pastel on parchment, by Joseph Duplessis, New York Public Library, 1778 (nypl.org)
Franklin lived in France from late 1776 until 1785, the last six as the United States Minister to France, living in Passy, near both Versailles and Paris. Franklin was very unassuming, dressing very plainly, with unpowdered hair, and he soon endeared himself to the populace. Sometime around 1778, Duplessis was approached by a wealthy patron who wanted to commission a portrait of Franklin. Franklin sat for few portraits, but he accepted this one. Late in 1778, a pastel drawing was in hand, and it survives, in the New York Public Library (NYPL; second image). It is little known, since it cannot be exposed to too much light, but if you own a 1929 series $100 bill (and don’t we all), you can see the NYPL likeness on the front (fifth image).
Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, oil on canvas, by Joseph Duplessis, 1778, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1778 (metmuseum.org)
The next year, Duplessis used the pastel as the basis for an oil painting. The face is slightly different in the oil painting, and the dress has been changed to red cloth and fur, and, since it was intended for display at the Academy salon for 1779, an elaborate frame was carved and gilded. The subject is identified only as VIR, or, in modern parlance, “The Man!” The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (third image)
Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, oil on canvas, by Joseph Duplessis, after 1779, North Carolina Museum of Art (ncartmuseum.org)
The portrait was a sensation, portraying Franklin exactly as everyone in France knew him, and many wanted copies of their own. Several dozen are known to exist, many by members of Duplessis’s workshop, but some by the master himself. There is a copy in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, with the same face but different dress (first image), and another, a particularly fine one, at the North Carolina Museum of Art (fourth image), and one at Monticello, and another in the Huntington Art Museum. There is yet another at the National Portrait Gallery in London, which I will only link to, since it demonstrates that not all copies are really copies, and some are markedly worse than others.
Older (1990) and newer (2009) versions of the U.S. $100 bill, both with Duplessis portraits of Benjamin Franklin
In 1914, the Federal Reserve Bank issued a new $100 bill, with a profile portrait of Franklin on the front. In 1929, that image was replaced by one based on the NYPL Duplessis pastel. In 1996, the design was changed again, and this time the Duplessis version in the National Portrait Gallery was used. It is still in use today (fifth image).
The MET did an exhibition in 2016 in which they brought in many of the variants of their Duplessis portrait of Franklin, including the NYPL pastel, but the exhibition’s web presence is now gone, alas. It did result in a fine article in the Metropolitan Museum Journal by several of the curators, which you can see and possibly gain access to here, and which I relied on to write this piece.
Self- portrait of Joseph Duplessis, oil on canvas, 1801, Palace of Versailles (Wikimedia commons)
As much as I like the various portraits of Franklin that Duplessis painted, I think I admire his self-portrait even more (sixth image). With its unflinching depiction of his 75-year-old time-battered self, it shows what made him such a great portraitist.
William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.
