Portrait of Colonel Charles Carter of Cleve (1707-1764)

Date1725-1730

MediumOil on canvas

DimensionsUnframed: 49" x 40" (124.5 cm. x 101.6 cm.) and Framed: 54" x 44 3/8" x 1"

Credit LineGift of Mrs. E. Alban Watson

Object number1961-56

DescriptionA three-quarter length portrait of a standing youngish man turned one-quarter towards the viewer's right. He stands in a vaguely defined interior space, apparently beside an open door, with a landscape vista shown in the righthand vertical third of the composition seen through the open door. A bracket table projects into the composition from the right, and on it rests the subject's dark blue, gold braid-trimmed tricorn hat, the near brim buttoned upright. The subject's proper left hand is thrust into his partially unbuttoned waistcoat; his proper right hand rests on his hip. He wears a dark blue coat and waistcoat over a white shirt that is gathered to create ruffles at the wrists, the coat sleeves open and unbuttoned over the forearms. The shirt has a simple band collar and a ruffle running vertically down the front, halfway to the waist. The coat has gold buttons and gold embroidered buttonholes. The subject wears a shoulder-length white wig, parted in the middle. Also visible is the hilt of a gold sword, shown hanging at his far (proper left) side.
The 2 3/8-inch black-painted molded frame with a gilded, sanded, and ornamented liner is a modern reproduction suppiled by J. H. Guttmann in 1977; its accession number is 1977-13(R).
Label TextThe portrait descended in the family of the subject as a treasured heirloom, but its fortunes took a sobering turn during the Civil War. When Union soldiers occupied Oxford, Mississippi, the painting was hastily cut out of its frame, folded, and stowed under the front porch of the owner's home for safekeeping. The turmoil of subsequent years precluded the painting's rehabilitation, and as descendants moved back and forth across the country, the names of both subject and artist were forgotten. By the time the portrait was conserved and re-stretched in the mid-twentieth century, considerable paint had been lost, enhancing the difficulty of making a stylistic attribution. The artist's identity remains uncertain today. More happily, the painting's line of descent and comparisons with other surviving portraits have ensured relatively confident identification of the subject.

Charles Carter was the second of eight children born to Robert ("King") Carter and his second wife, Elizabeth Landon Willis, whom he married in 1701. (Four children had resulted from King Carter's marriage to his first wife, Judith Armistead). Charles wed three times over the course of his life, first, in 1728, Mary Walker (d. 1742), second, in 1742, Anne Byrd (1725-1757) and, third, in 1762, Lucy Taliaferro. He fathered three sons and ten daughters.

After several years' education in England, Charles Carter returned to Virginia in 1724. His father established him at Urbanna in Middlesex County, but following King Carter's 1732 death, Charles removed to "Stanstead," north of Falmouth. Subsequently, he purchased Ralph Wormley's "Cleves" plantation, located on the Rappanhannock River just above Port Royal in King George County. It was there that he built, about 1750, the notable brick house known as "Cleve" (or "Cleves"), a structure that was destroyed by fire in 1800 and rebuilt, then finally destroyed by fire in 1916.

Charles Carter held several public offices before 1736, the first of twenty-eight consecutive years in which he served as a burgess from King George County. For a time, he owned the the Williamsburg dwelling now known as the Robert Carter House on Palace Green. (When he acquired the property is unclear, but his conveyance of it to Robert Cary in 1746 is documented).

Carter wrote his will in 1762, specifying, among other details, that a sermon be preached annually on the anniversary of his death on the theme of Numbers 23:10 ("let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like him"). He further stipulated that his estate not be appraised and that his unwed sons and daughters wait until they reached the respective ages of twenty-one and seventeen before marrying. He also directed that he be given a plain and simple burial because he "never delighted in funeral pomps."

But Carter's funereal frugality seems to have been a matter of necessity, not choice. According to legal writer William Waller Hening (ca. 1767-1828), Carter died "totally insolvent," having wasted his fortune on "various chimeri[c]al projects," including "building a very costly house on one estate and in a short time . . . taking it down and carrying it to another."

ProvenanceThe early part of the following line of descent is speculated, the latter part documented: From the subject to his son, Landon Carter (1751-1811); to his son, Robert Charles Carter (1783-1849); to his son, Robert Otway Carter (1810-1874) of "Cleve" and Oxford, Miss.; to his wife, Mrs. Robert Otway Carter (Edmonia Fauntleroy Corbin)(1825-1917); to her granddaughter, Mrs. Lucia Sloan Hopkins of St. Louis, Mo., and La Jolla, California; in 1950, to her cousin, Mrs. E. Alban Watson (Lucille McWane) of Lynchburg, Va.; in 1961, to CWF.