Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson?

This is not a portrait of either Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson, but it is a portrait of one of their contemporaries, an unknown early 19th-century Virginian done by a French artist called St. Memin.

Judge Dabney Carr or Overton Anderson?

Shortly before I was planning to head back to Michigan, Maureen showed me something I’d never seen before. She brought out a small round profile portrait in black and white of an elegantly dressed, late 18^th-century gentleman. It was two inches in diameter in a silver frame and inscribed in pencil on the back in an old-fashioned hand: “Judge Dabney Carr, St. Memins.” It had been treasured by both Maureen's late husband Bill Minor and her late brother-in-law Dr. George Minor, who kept it in the centerpiece on his dining room table. 
When Maureen showed me the image of an eighteenth-century Minor ancestor that had descended somehow through the family, it gave me a little shiver of connection with the past of two-hundred years ago.


Both George’s and Bill's grandmother and great-grandmother were Carrs who married Minors, and they were proud to have this elegant little portrait of an ancestor. Maureen was distressed when the picture had seemed lost in the confusion as ignorant, ill-intentioned strangers cleared out George's house, but months later she was very happy to find it tossed in a box with other less significant objects.

                  “I don’t know exactly what this is,” Maureen said. “A drawing? Do you think it’s a photograph of a portrait that George had framed?” I looked at it closely; it didn’t look like a photograph.

                  A quick search turned up plenty of information about the artist. A French aristocrat who fled the Revolution in his own country and came to America in 1796, Charles-Balthazar-Julien Saint Memin  (1770 – 1852) worked with a copying device called a physiognotrace, invented in France in 1783. This allowed the artist to trace a very accurate profile of his sitter, which he then filled in by drawing facial details with a pencil or chalk. This was then transferred to an engraving plate. For $25, the sitter bought the original drawing and twelve copies of the engraving; more could be ordered. In fact, Thomas Jefferson purchased forty-eight copies of his portrait. George Washington, Meriwether Lewis, and Paul Revere sat to St. Memin, as did hundreds of other reasonably well-heeled new American citizens, up and down the East Coast. The charge for women’s portraits was $35, presumably because details of dress required more time. There are only a few examples of women but the artist did portraits of several elaborately dressed Native American chiefs who came to Washington, D.C. to be received by The Great White Father.

                  Judge Dabney Carr (1773-1837) was a nephew of Thomas Jefferson; his father also named Dabney Carr (1743-1773) had married Jefferson’s younger sister Martha. The elder Carr died the year his son was born, and according to the Jefferson Encyclopedia, young Dabney “spent a great deal of his early life at Monticello under the care of Jefferson.” He began practicing law in Albemarle County; by 1824 he was elected to be a judge of the court of appeals in the northern Virginia town of Winchester.

St. Memin spent the years from 1803-09 working in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Richmond, so it seems likely that Carr’s portrait was done then. St Memin returned to France in 1809.

                  It’s not difficult to figure out how the Minors are related to Judge Dabney Carr, and no doubt there are other connections among  old Albemarle County families. I’m descended from a Dr. John Gilmer and Sarah Minor, whose graves are in the same small family cemetery as my mother’s. If I am in any way related to Judge Dabney Carr, it would be distantly and in some highly convoluted fashion. But with a Carr grandmother and great-grandmother, it seems reasonable that the Minors would inherit the little portrait of their cousin.

                 

                  A few days later, Maureen pursued some information about St. Memin and Carr and found that a distant Minor relative had previously done so, but she had come to a different conclusion about the portrait. In a large, expensive book ($400 on Amazon) published by the Smithsonian that includes all portraits by St. Memin in their collection, there is an identical print identified in St. Memin’s handwriting as Overton Anderson. And who was that? His mother too was a Carr, and so he was a distant relative of the Minor family. His fifteen minutes of fame rests on the fact that he was rejected as a juror in the 1807 treason trial of Aaron Burr. He had no children, so it is reasonable to suppose that his twelve portraits might have been handed down through the family, who confused him with Judge Carr. The handwriting couldn’t have been St. Memin’s, as Carr was only made a judge long after the artist had returned to France.

                  If the portrait does in fact represent Overton Anderson, does that change it’s meaning? It is no longer shows a Minor ancestor; no longer Thomas Jefferson’s nephew.  The two elderly Minor brothers, George and Bill who treasured it, both died recently, happily before anyone raised the possibility that it might not be their ancestor at all. The engraving is still an attractive little object, two hundred years old, but it no longer carries the historical significance and emotional meaning that was determined by its misidentification. Bill and Maureen's children and grandchildren will inherit it but I don't think Overton Anderson can have the same resonance for them that Judge Dabney Carr had for the older generation.