JOHN ADAMS. (Amsterdam print.)
The Amsterdam edition, 1782, of Geschiedenis van het Geschil tusschen Groot-Britannie en Amerika ... door zijne Excellentie, den Heere John Adams.
There is a likeness of John Adams as a young man engraved in his Life and Works, vol. ii. He says of himself at the time of the famous scene when Otis was making his plea against the Writs of Assistance, and he was taking notes of it, that the artist depicting it would have to represent the young reporter as "looking like a short, thick Archbishop of Canterbury" (Works, x. 245). There was a print published in London in 1783 showing a head in a circle, which is reproduced in the Mag. of Amer. Hist., xi. 93. Copley painted him once, in 1783, in court dress, and the painting now hangs in Memorial Hall, Cambridge. The head of this full-length picture was engraved for Stockdale's edition of Adams's Defence of the Constitutions, published in 1794; and the painting was never engraved to show the entire figure till it appeared in vol. v. of the Works (A. T. Perkins's Copley, p. 27). Cf. the head in Bartlett Woodward's United States.
Stuart first painted him in 1812, and this picture belongs to his descendants, and is engraved in the Works, vol. i. There are copies of this picture by Gilbert Stuart Newton and B. Otis, both of which have been engraved. The Newton copy is in the Mass. Hist. Society (Catal. of Cabinet, no. 47; Proc., 1862, p. 3). The Otis copy has been engraved by J. B. Longacre (Sanderson's Signers, vol. viii.). Stuart again painted Adams in 1825, the year before he died, representing him as sitting at one end of a sofa. It is engraved on steel in the Works, vol. x., and on wood in the Mem. Hist. Boston, iii. 192. (Cf. Mason's Stuart, p. 125.) Another Stuart is owned by Mr. T. Jefferson Coolidge, of Boston.
A portrait by Col. John Trumbull also hangs in Memorial Hall, Cambridge; and Adams's likeness is also in Independence Hall. (Cf. Irving's Washington, quarto ed., vol. v.) A cabinet full-length by Winstanley, painted while Adams was at the Hague (1782), is in the Boston Museum (Johnston's Orig. Portraits of Washington, p. 93).
Among the contemporary popular engravings, mention may be made of that by Norman in the Boston Magazine, Feb., 1784; one in the European Magazine (vol. iv. 83).
Stuart also painted a portrait of the wife of John Adams, which is engraved in the Works, vol. ix. A picture of her by Blythe, at the age of twenty-one, accompanies the Familiar Letters.
Views of the Adams homestead in Quincy, Mass., are given in the Works (vol. i. p. 598); in Appleton's Journal (xii. 385); in Mrs. Lamb's Homes of America. An india-ink sketch, showing a distant view of Boston beyond the house, is in the halls of the Bostonian Society.—Ed.
The Massachusetts Assembly was in no amiable frame of mind. When there was no cause for quarrel, they made one. Bernard had probably been advised to preserve a prudent silence respecting political affairs. At the opening of the session, January 28, 1767, in a message of less than ten printed lines, he recommended "the support of the authority of the government, the maintenance of the honor of the province, and the promotion of the welfare of the people", as the chief objects for their consultation. This called forth a captious reply, and a complaint because Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson, who had not been reëlected to the Council, appeared in the council-chamber at the opening of the session, at the request of the governor and as matter of courtesy. The House found in his presence, if voluntary, "a new and additional instance of ambition and lust of power."