Mather Brown was a teenaged wine salesman who painted the “Addams” family...ok, not that “Addams” family. 

Born in Boston to the long Mather line of puritanical religious bigots, Brown was raised by his staunchly British loyalist aunts. Gilbert Stuart taught him to draw as a child, and at age 16 he set out on a walking tour of upstate New York selling wine and painting portraits.

This adventure financed his trip to Europe to study under Anglo-American artist Benjamin West. In England, Brown painted John and Abigail Adams (John was then ambassador to Britain following the American Revolution), and their daughter Nabby. Nabby wrote of the sittings, “A rage for Painting has taken Possession of the Whole family!...He [Mather Brown] has a good likeness of Momma.” For his own part, John Adams thought Brown caught his daughter’s characteristic “drollery and modesty.” This led to a commission to paint Thomas Jefferson (the earliest known image of the future president), who exchanged portraits with Adams. Another of his notable American portraits was of fellow artist John Singleton Copley’s mother.

Brown was the first American to study in the Royal Academy, and painted several members of the British Royal Family. In particular, he was official painter to King George III’s son, Prince Frederick Augustus, Duke of York. He also painted well received scenes from history and Shakespeare’s plays.

Brown painted one of the most important people you’ve never heard of, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. Saint-Georges was an Afro-Caribbean black champion fencer and classical musician, who was an acquaintance of Mozart and composed several operas and symphonies. Brown’s portrait of Saint-George is not among his most iconic, but is historically important as one of the earliest Western depictions of a black person as handsome, socially prominent and independently successful. You can see a reproduction in the National Portrait Gallery London.

Brown’s meteoric rise to fame was short-lived. By the end of his life, he was penniless, with warehouses full of unsold art, borrowing money from his aunts and dying in obscurity. He could not have known that the young, scrappy, and hungry colonial rebels he painted would one day hang in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in the capital of the most powerful nation on Earth. They certainly didn't throw away their shot. It was the old, old story of the artist; death before success. At least he kept both his ears.