“THE ARCHIBALD BULLOCH FAMILY”
In 1771, Henry Benbridge moved to Charleston, South Carolina, and became the city’s most fashionable portraitist after the death of Jeremiah Theus. “The Archibald Bulloch Family” is the first work by Benbridge to enter the museum’s permanent collection and now hangs alongside Theus’s “Portrait of John Habersham,” allowing the museum to feature the two leading portraitists of the 18th-century American South. As the largest extant canvas among Benbridge’s many portraits of the white southern elite, the painting features one of the most important families in early Georgia history. Archibald Bulloch, who would become governor and commander- in-chief of the revolutionary state of Georgia shortly after this picture was painted, stands with his wife and their three children, all of whom held important military and political positions in subsequent years. Recent research has revealed this painting’s relationship to another of Benbridge’s portraits, “Mary Bryan Morel and Her Children” (ca. 1774; Telfair Museums). In both, the matriarch of the family wears the same blue gown, and many of the children wear identical costume, indicating that Benbridge painted these two portraits at roughly the same time and suggesting that these prominent Savannah families sought to ally themselves — in commerce, politics or otherwise — through a striking visual gesture. This portrait also allows the museum to address the Bulloch families’ deep investment in the stability and prosperity of slavery in the British colony (and later the revolutionary state) of Georgia. After all, Bulloch’s aristocratic aspirations and material wealth in this portrait depended on the economy of slavery, which, as a politician on both local and national levels, he actively sought to preserve. Through this portrait, the museum also has an opportunity to highlight those families whom the institution of slavery — and its proponents like the Bullochs — made intentionally anonymous and largely invisible.
Henry Benbridge (American, 1743 – 1812) “The Archibald Bulloch Family,” ca. 1775. Oil on canvas. 89 × 67 inches. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Museum purchase with funds provided by the William Underwood Eiland Endowment for Acquisitions made possible by M. Smith Griffith. GMOA 2020.1
GEORGIA DECORATIVE ARTS
This chair was found in the 20th century in a barn on the Whitworth home place in Madison County, Georgia, by the donor’s grandmother Charlotte Gurley Whitworth. The chair was always referred to as “Aunt Polly Tribble’s chair.” Aunt Polly (Mary “Polly” Hampton Tribble, 1811 – after 1888) was born to George (1772 – 1862) and Sarah Hampton (1773 – 1870). Although George was born in Kent County, Delaware, and Sarah in Maryland, they were married in Guildford, North Carolina, where their families migrated before George and Sarah moved to Madison County, Georgia. The chair has arc-shaped voids clipped from beneath its slats in a way very reminiscent of the more gracefully shaped 18th-century versions produced in the Delaware River Valley. The chair is a beautiful example of how Georgia hybridizes different style sources during the period of its settlement. It appeared in the exhibition “Material Georgia 1733 – 1900: Two Decades of Scholarship” at the museum, and we are pleased to add it to our permanent collection.
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