In his notebook, artist John Smibert recorded painting this portrait of Major Paul Mascarene in June 1729. Mascarene places his left hand on a map while gesturing with his right to a hilly scene in the window behind him—likely a modified view of the town of Annapolis Royal and Fort Anne in Nova Scotia. Smibert’s restrained palette, straightforward composition, and old-fashioned armor (which was already outdated when Mascarene posed for the portrait) belie the complex colonial circumstances depicted in the work.
Mascarene’s identity was multifaceted. Born in France, he grew up amid national religious conflicts that forced his Protestant Huguenot father to flee the country, while his mother converted to Catholicism. Mascarene landed in England, where he embarked on a military career that took him to North America to support British campaigns against the French in Canada. He spent the rest of his life in Boston and the British colony of Nova Scotia. There, he held government posts that placed him in the middle of contentious relations between British colonizers, French Catholics, and Indigenous communities.
In 1720, Mascarene authored a description of Nova Scotia that enumerated the natural resources available there, including grain, cattle, wood, mines, coal, stone, and fish, noting that, “It is easy from hence to infer of how much benefit it is to Great Britain that two such considerable branches of trade as the supplies for Naval Stores, and the Fishery may remain in her possession.” He also undertook a coastal survey of the area. The map and drafting instruments visible on the table in Smibert’s portrait allude to the colonial desire to record and control new territories.
Like Mascarene, Smibert was a product of British colonial ambitions. He emigrated to North America from Scotland to work as a professor of fine arts at a new university in Bermuda established by Anglican bishop George Berkeley. However, when that endeavor failed, Smibert stayed in Boston, where he operated a portrait studio, collected art, and sold supplies, helping to disseminate European artistic practices to aspiring artists in the British American colonies. His professional success was likely supported by enslaved labor, as evidenced by a 1737 newspaper notice in which Smibert attempted to find Cuffee, his enslaved Black servant, who was wearing “Leather Breeches stain’d with divers sorts of paints” (Van Horn, 35). Between artist and subject, Smibert’s portrait of Major Paul Mascarene is a visual embodiment of the varied and fraught journeys that often converged in colonial sites.
Selected Bibliography
Mascarene, Paul. “Description of Nova Scotia.” In Selections from the Public Documents of the Province of Nova Scotia, ed. Thomas B. Akins. C. Annand, 1869. https://archive.org/details/selectionsfromp00akingoog/page/38/mode/2up.
Saunders, Richard H. John Smibert: Colonial America’s First Portrait Painter. Yale University Press, 1995.
Stanwood, Owen. “A Refugee in the Service of Empire: The Life and Lessons of Paul Mascarene.” Diasporas 34 (2019): 31−45. https://doi.org/10.4000/diasporas.4097.
Smibert, John. The Notebook of John Smibert; with Essays by Sir David Evans, John Kerslake, and Andrew Oliver. Massachusetts Historical Society, 1969.
Van Horn, Jennifer. Portraits of Resistance: Activating Art during Slavery. Yale University Press, 2022.
Selected Exhibition History
Studio of the artist, Boston, January 1730, no cat. traced.
The Smibert Tradition, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, 1949 (cat. published as Bulletin of the Associates in Fine Arts, Yale University, 17, nos. 2−3 [1949], no. 20).
