Franklin & Friends

Busy Benjamin Franklin crowded into one long life enough activities to do several normally energetic men. As No. 1 citizen and foreign agent of Pennsylvania Colony and later as first U. S. Ambassador to France, he knew the political bigwigs of England and Europe, was highly esteemed by many an 18th Century intellectual. Franklin also found time to sit for an astonishing number of portraits, became in his own right a respectable art patron. Last week New York's Metropolitan Museum opened an exhibition, billed as "Benjamin Franklin and His Circle," which included, along with some 350 works of art, such memorabilia as Franklin's coat & breeches, and the great man's Pennsylvania Fire Place.

Backbone of the exhibit was the Halsey Collection of more than 100 Wedgwood portrait medallions, which Franklin's contemporaries called "cameos." Among the Franklin friends whose likenesses were thus ceramically preserved were Josiah Wedgwood himself, William Penn, William Pitt, Sir Jeffrey Amherst, Erasmus Darwin (Charles's grandfather), Charles James Fox, David Garrick, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Samuel Johnson, George Washington, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Jean Franc,ois Marie Arouet (Voltaire) and Catherine II of Russia.

Artistically, the show's most impressive items were the Houdon portrait busts of Franklin, Voltaire, Lafayette and John Paul Jones, and an allegorical engraving of Franklin's genius by Jean Honore Fragonard. Paintings began with Harvard's stiff, colonial portrait of Franklin at about the age of 42, attributed to the early New England painter, Robert Feke. A studious characteristic pose was that of the famed "thumb portrait," done in London by

David Martin as a gift for Franklin's family when the subject was 61. Franklin specified the thumb on chin, made no objection to the warts (see cut). Ten years later Jean Baptiste Greuze made him elderly and dignified in a fur collar and fine blue velvet coat to match his eyes.

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