Joseph-Siffred Duplessis

Private collection, Lyon;
Anonymous sale, Paris, Piasa, 13 December 2006, lot 16;
With Hirschl and Adler, New York;
From whom purchased by the present collector. 

This iconic image of Benjamin Franklin, one of the most important early leaders of the American republic and perhaps its greatest diplomat, is a key milestone of modern political portraiture. It is one of the few autograph oil paintings of Franklin executed by his most accomplished and sought after portraitists, Joseph Siffred-Duplessis, whose depictions of Franklin were among the most widely disseminated images of the late 18^thcentury.

Duplessis exhibited his first portrait of Benjamin Franklin at the Paris Salon of 1779, where it achieved instant popularity and became the inspiration for all subsequent depictions of Franklin by the artist. That seminal 1779 portrait, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 1) epitomized how the colonial diplomat sought to be viewed: as an earnest, hardworking man of the people for whom the finer trappings of life held no serious interest. As in the present portrait, Franklin is depicted in the Met version without a formal wig or elegant coat. Rather, he is presented in the simplest of ways, with his graying hair loose, resting casually on his shoulders. Whereas in the Met picture, where he wears a fur collar over his coat, no doubt an allusion to his status as the symbol of the “New World Tradesman”, this rendering of Franklin is pared down even further, showing the elder statesmen in a simple grey coat with a white collar. These deliberate iconographic choices elevate these portraits beyond a simple likeness, and must be considered among Franklin’s greatest efforts at self promotion and political propaganda. Seizing upon France’s contemporary enlightenment predilections, he sets himself apart as a man of the people, a humble representative with the singular goal of spreading democratic ideals. Franklin was, of course, among the most cunning personalities of the day and was keenly aware of how his likeness would resonate in France, a country he first visited in December 1776 with the explicit diplomatic mission of gaining both financial and military support for the American effort against the British government. Duplessis’ image succeeds in illustrating this attempt, by showing Franklin as the democratic idealist, Philadelphia printer, and creator of the character Richard Saunders, the everyman distributor of commonsense advice in Franklin’s best-selling Poor Richard’s Almanac, begun as a serial in 1732 and translated into French and published there in 1777.

While numerous versions of Duplessis’ Franklin portraits exist, most fall into two categories: the “fur coat” type as seen in the original Met version, and the latter “grey coat” type, of which this is considered by Rachel Dudouit as one of only two fully autograph oils. The prototype for the grey coat portrait is a pastel, executed by Duplessis in 1783, and now located in the New York Public Library (fig. 2). Scholars have debated whether the grey coat pastel predates the Met portrait, thus serving as a study, or whether Duplessis sought to simplify the Met version with an even more simplified and humble depiction of Franklin. As asserted by Dudouit, Duplessis painted only one additional autograph version of the grey coat type in addition to the present canvas and the New York Public Library pastel, that which is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.¹ 

It is a testament to both Franklin, of course, but also Duplessis that his image was then, as now, so universally appreciated. Evidence which illuminates this point is the fact that Duplessis exhibited a portrait of Franklin in 1801, only one year before his death, and twenty three years after his first treatment of the subject.² Franklin himself was intimately aware of how intense the French fascination with his likeness was. He commented to his daughter, Sally Bache: “The numbers sold are incredible. These, with the pictures, busts, and prints (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere), have made your father’s face as well-known as that of the moon”.³  It comes as little surprise then that Franklin’s image remains one of the most iconic in popular American culture, no doubt maintained by his rendering on the US $100 bill. It should be noted that from 1929 until 1993, the Met version of Franklin was used as the model for the currency image, when in 1994 it changed to the present composition (fig. 3) as the model for the bill.

Rachel Dudouit plans to record this work as no. 2 among the "Grey Coat" portraits of Franklin in her forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the work of Duplessis.⁴

1. C. Kinder Carr and Ellen G. Miles, A Brush with History: Paintings from the National Portrait Gallery, Washington 2001, pp. 72–73 cat. no. 7).
2. C. Coleman Sellers, Benjamin Franklin in Portraiture, New Haven 1962, pp. 246-247.
3. W. Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, New York 2003, p. 327. 
4. Private correspondence, March 2010