Art: Far from Home

The brown obscurity of the painting glowed faintly with candlelight and with rose, blue and yellow waistcoats. The clock on the wall pointed to 2 a.m. and everyone seemed to be having a splendid time splicing the main brace—except for an old salt named Jonas Wanton. Jonas had passed out cold, but he remained a center of attention: one wassailer was being sick beside him, while Stephen Hopkins (who was later to sign the Declaration of Independence for Rhode Island) blessed his bald head with grog.

The scene showed how not-so-puritanical New Englanders used to carry on in foreign ports. Entitled Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, it was painted in 1758 by a footloose portraitist named John Greenwood (who put himself in the picture, holding a candle at the door), and was recently bought by the City Art Museum of St. Louis for $8,500. Done in the days when most U.S. painters contented themselves with fashioning idealized portraits of the rich, it is, crowed Museum Director Perry T. Rathbone, “virtually the only painting by an American artist depicting everyday life in the 18th Century.”