AFA Autumn 2021

2021 Antiques & Fine Art 77 Bass Otis (1784–1861), Lemuel Shattuck and Family, 1850. Oil on canvas, H. 60, W. 47⅜ inches. Gift of Lillian F. Thompson, 1920 (R0281). Lemuel Shattuck (1793–1859), one of the founders and the first vice president of New England Historic Genealogical Society, commissioned Bass Otis to paint this ambitious family portrait. Shattuck was an accomplished man. He was a teacher, bookseller, and publisher, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives and the Boston City Council, and one of the founders of the American Statistical Association. In 1839 Shattuck championed legislation to require a better system for the registration of vital information. After participating in the design and implementation of the Boston Census of 1845, he went to Washington to help design an improved federal census. His 1850 Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts (commonly known as the Shattuck Report) is considered one of the most significant documents in the area of public health. Shattuck has been memorialized in the name of a teaching hospital in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and is honored at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where his name appears on the frieze of the school’s building, together with twenty-two other visionaries in the area of public health. In this group portrait, Shattuck is seated at left, with his wife, Clarissa Baxter (1797–1871), seated at the far right, hands crossed in her lap and her left arm resting on an urn. Their five daughters are also pictured. The 1850 date of this painting straddles several family threshold events. The wedding of Sarah White to her cousin, John Henry Shattuck (born 1819), on June 13, 1849, may have prompted its creation. However, the death of youngest daughter Frances on June 26, 1850, raises the possibility that Otis included her posthumously (at center with her elbow on the table).

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