Lucy Henry Harrison to Stan Henkels

Letter

Patrick Henry's Red Hill

Name/Title

Lucy Henry Harrison to Stan Henkels

Entry/Object ID

04.13.11

Description

A handwritten letter on three pages of plain stationery. From Mrs. Lucy Henry Harrison to Stan V. Henkels. Dated July 20, 1910. Mrs. Harrison continues to dispute with Henkels over the value of the collection and defends the provenance of the Sully portrait from William Wirt Henry's biography. She includes a two-page insert copied from William Wirt Henry's biography concerning the provenance of this portrait. Five pages in all. The following objects mentioned in this letter are in the Red Hill collection: - Book: "Sketches of the Life and Character of Patrick Henry" by William Wirt, 1817 (02.16) - Books: "Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches", 1891 (77.6.1-3)

Transcription

Brookneal, Campbell Co. Virginia Mr. Stan V. Henkels (July 20/1910) My Dear Sir: The latter part of May, Dr. Mitchell, to whom I had written about selling the collection of Henry papers which had been at Jamestown and of which I sent him a published list, wrote me that he was about to leave town for his summer vacation and suggested that I should write directly to you about the papers, books and the portrait, telling me that he had already consulted you about them. I at once wrote to you that there were more relics of which I gave you a list, which I would add to the relics which Dr. Mitchell had already spoken to you of and I told you that my price for them was at least $15,000. I quote from your letter of June 3rd in answer to mine: “Your collection, properly catalogued and placed before the public would fetch, I have no doubt, the price you expect.” “I have, however, great faith in a public sale of such materials as I made very successful sales of the effects of Geo. Washington.” Etc. “It would be useless for me to attempt to get a customer for them unless I had the material in hand.” You repeated this in another portion of the letter and feeling assured by your confidence in getting the price which I asked, I hastened to have all the articles packed and sent to you. In your most recent letter to me, when you had received the box of papers but had not opened it for want of the key, and when you knew that the rest of the articles were on the way, you began to ask for a lower price saying, “I will obey your instructions as to the value of $15,000 but hardly think you will get it.” This surprised me greatly as your previous letter had been so assured in its tone, but, I was entirely unprepared for your more recent letters in which you tell me that you do not think that you can get more than $7,000 for the whole collection. I would not think for a moment of selling it for that price, and had you not muslead [sic] me by your first letter I would never have gone to the trouble and expense of sending it to you. I wish you would reread your correspondence with me and see how entirely you have gone back upon your first correspondence. You speak of one of Lee’s letters lacking the signature and in bad shape; you do not speak of the many which have the signature, nor do you speak of the Resolutions against the Stamp Act, the receipt for the Gunpowder, and the other papers which have a unique value. The portrait has been hanging in the state library and whatever soil there is upon it from dust and flies can easily be removed and does not in any way effect [sic] its value. Page2 July 20/1910 From what you write me, you seem to be entirely ignorant of its history. I enclose the history of it copied from Vol. II of Wm. Wirt Henry’s Life of Patrick Henry (page 651). Mr. Henry was the son of John Henry, the youngest son of Patrick Henry. As the widow of Patrick Henry lived more than thirty years after his death, and was living when Mr. Wirt wrote the life of Henry and presented the portrait to John Henry, there can be no doubt as to the truthfulness of this account. Moreover, the Hon. Wm. Wirt Henry was a man of such scrupulous honor, that he would never have published the history of the portrait had there been the slightest doubt as to the truth of it, and of such keen intelligence that he would have discovered a flaw in the account had there been one. You however have brought a charge against the picture which would entirely distroy [sic] its value commercially and in every other way except as a fine piece of painting. You write me that what you say is an historic fact which cannot be contradicted. If this is so, of course you will be able to furnish proof of your assertions and I ask that you shall send this to me at once. Of course I have a reverence for these relics and so have every other patriotic and cultivated American. It is this reverence which gives them value, and this alone. I wish you would send me at one an itemized receipt for everything I have sent you. This you should have done long ago, as your letter saying that you had “received everything you have sent me,” is not sufficiently definite to identify my property. I will also be glad if you will explain to me why after enthusing over the collection and writing me that you would have no difficulty in getting $15,000 for it, you should now have come down to less than half that sum. I am not willing to go to any further expense until I decide what to do. Please let me hear from you at once. Very truly yours, Mrs. M. B. Harrison Per E. H. K. July 20th 1910 Patrick Henry Life Correspondence And Speeches By W. Wirt Henry Vol. II Page 651 “The author received the following information from his father, John Henry, the youngest son of Patrick Henry, in regard to the Sully portrait, from which the etching in the first volume has been made. During the trial of the British Debt cause in the United States Court in Richmond, a French artist attended, and painted a miniature of Patrick Henry representing him as speaking. The artist presented the miniature, set in gold, to Mr. Henry, who afterward gave it to the wife of his half brother, Mrs. John Syme. While Mr. Wirt was preparing his Life of Mr. Henry, he was allowed by the Flemings, descendants of Col. Syme, to have a portrait painted by Thomas Sully of Phila., from this miniature. The artist copied the miniature with some slight alterations as to the wig, suggested by Chief Justice Marshall. The portrait when completed was entrusted to Mr. James Webster, the publisher of Mr. Wirt’s Life of Henry in order that it might be engraved for the forth coming volume. Afterwards Mr. Wirt, while Attorney General of the United States, presented the portrait to John Henry who was living at Red Hill with his mother. He was too young when his father died to have remembered him but his mother and older brother and sisters pronounced it the best likeness they ever saw of Patrick Henry. John Henry gave this portrait at his death to the author.” The British Debt case was argued in November 1791, only eight years before Mr. Henry’s death and Mrs. Henry’s account to her children, of the miniature, must have been true as she undoubtly [sic] could not have made a mistake about a matter of recent occurrence. It is still owned by a member of the Fleming family. Mr. John Henry himself was grown when it was sent to Sully as a study for the portrait and he gave the account to Mr. Wm. Wirt Henry which is copied above. Mrs. M.B. Harrison

Language

English

Dimensions

Width

6-1/2 in

Length

10 in

Dimension Notes

Details: 9-3/4 inches x 5-3/4 inches

Provenance

Notes

This letter belongs to a collection of correspondence primarily from Lucy Gray Henry Harrison (1857–1944) to Stanislaus “Stan” Vincent Henkels (1854–1926) concerning a proposed sale of Patrick Henry family heirlooms in 1910. Mrs. Harrison was Patrick Henry's great-granddaughter and the last Henry descendant to own and live at Red Hill. She grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and moved to Duluth, Minnesota, after marrying real estate millionaire Matthew Bland Harrison (1853–1892) in 1886. In 1905, she inherited Red Hill and moved onto the property, where she lived along with her sister, Elizabeth Watkins Henry Lyons (1855–1920), and her assistant, Elizabeth H. Kerper (1890–1964). Mrs. Harrison inherited many of the family heirlooms that had belonged to Patrick Henry and many of his papers. In 1910, on the advice of Philadelphia neurologist and writer Dr. Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), she contacted Stan V. Henkels about a possible private sale or public auction of some of these pieces. Mr. Henkels was an antique dealer in Philadelphia well-known for his auctions and private sales to collectors. In 1890 and 1891, he cataloged two sales of George Washington-related documents and artifacts while he worked as chief auctioneer for the company Thomas Birch’s Sons. The correspondence from Mrs. Harrison to Mr. Henkels details their business negotiations from May 1910 leading up to the sale of the items in Philadelphia on December 20, 1910. It also includes letters concerning a settling of accounts between them up through February 1911. Mrs. Harrison’s connection to Dr. Weir Mitchell is unknown. Dr. Mitchell began his medical career as a physiologist, graduating from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia and going on to study the physiological effects of venoms and poisons in animals. During the Civil War, he was a contract surgeon in Philadelphia hospitals. He became interested in diseases of the nervous system, leading him to become a pioneer in American neurology. He is best known for his prescription of the “rest cure” for the treatment of psychiatric diseases, which consisted of bedrest, dieting, electrotherapy, and massage. Dr. Mitchell also published novels and poetry. The Henry heirlooms Mrs. Harrison sent to auction included a collection of Henry’s letters and other documents. One of the auctioned documents was Henry’s handwritten draft of the Stamp Act Resolves, which Charles Hamilton (1847–1930) bought for $1,400 and is now in the special collections of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library at Colonial Williamsburg. Two other documents, a draft of a 1795 letter (76.5.7) from Henry to George Washington (1732–1799) and a 1782 land grant (76.5.6) signed by Governor Benjamin Harrison V. (1726–1791), are now in the Red Hill collection after being purchased at Mr. Henkels’ auction by Charles Hamilton (1847–1930) and donated to the PHMF by Mr. Hamilton’s heirs in 1959. A copy of the receipt for the reimbursement of the gunpowder that Lord Dunmore ordered taken from the Williamsburg Magazine in April 1775 was bought at the auction by the Virginia State Library for $100 and is now housed at the Virginia Museum of History & Culture. Other papers included letters between Henry and Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794) and letters to Henry from Henry Lee III (1756–1818) and David Ross (1739–1819). Some of Henry’s letters had been displayed at the 1907 Ter-Centennial exposition at Jamestown, within an exhibit on Virginia history. The historic documents featured in the Virginia exhibit were loaned from the Virginia State Library, which had likely loaned some of the Henry papers from Mrs. Harrison. The collection of Henry’s English law books that Mrs. Harrison sent to auction included five volumes of “Modern Reports: Being a Collection of several Special Cases Most of them adjudged in the Court of Common Pleas,” published between 1700 and 1720, which were purchased by the Museum of the American Revolution and are currently housed in their collection. Also included was William Peere William’s “Report of Cases Argued and Determined in the High Court of Chancery,” published in 1749. This was purchased from the auction by the publishing firm Dodd & Livingston for $26. Thomas Sully’s (1783–1872) portrait of Patrick Henry is an oil painting on canvas commissioned in 1815 by Henry’s first biographer, William Wirt (1772–1834). An engraving of the portrait was featured on the frontispiece of Wirt’s 1817 biography, “Sketches of the Life & Character of Patrick Henry.” Sully based the portrait on one of the few images of Henry painted from life: a miniature created, not by a French artist in 1791, as Mrs. Harrison and her father believed, but in 1795 by Sully’s half-brother, Lawrence Sully (1769–1804). Thomas Sully’s portrait of Henry was given by Wirt to Henry’s youngest son, John (1796–1868), who passed the portrait on to his son William Wirt Henry (1831–1900), who loaned it to the Virginia State Library in Richmond from 1873 to 1884 before he passed it on to his daughter, Lucy Harrison. In 1902, Mrs. Harrison loaned the portrait again to the Virginia State Library but reclaimed it in 1910 to sell it at Mr. Henkels’ auction, where it was purchased by Charles Hamilton for $4,000. The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation later purchased the portrait from the Hamilton family and currently has it in its collection. Lawrence Sully’s miniature of Henry was painted from life in 1795. The miniature passed through the family of Patrick Henry’s older half-brother, John Syme Jr. (1727–?), and in 1910, was owned by Syme’s great-grandson, John Syme Fleming Jr. (1842–1922). Mr. Fleming sent it to auction at the same 1910 sale that Mrs. Harrison sent her Henry heirlooms to. It was sold at auction for $660 to Gilbert Sunderland Parker (1861–1921), the curator of paintings at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. At some point, it passed into the possession of Herbert Lee Pratt (1871–1945), who left it to Amherst College in 1945. Mr. Henkels’ doubt about the Sully portrait’s authenticity may be related to an unfounded claim published in 1909 in “The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography” that the Lawrence Sully miniature, which served as Thomas Sully’s inspiration, was not painted from life. The magazine’s editor, Charles Henry Hart (1847–1918), invalidated this claim before the December 1910 auction when he identified the miniature as a life portrait. William Wirt Henry, a grandson of Patrick Henry and the father of Mrs. Harrison, published three volumes of “Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches” (77.6.1-3) in 1891. He was born at Red Hill and served as a commonwealth attorney for Charlotte County. He served in the Confederate Army, moved to Richmond to continue his law practice, and served in the Virginia House of Delegates and the Virginia Senate. In addition to his biographies of Patrick Henry, he wrote articles on other historical events and people. While his primary residence was in Richmond, William Wirt Henry inherited Red Hill from his father, John Henry, and maintained it until his death. He married Lucy Gray Marshall (1832–1922) in 1854 and had five children. The Patrick Henry Memorial Foundation purchased this letter from an online seller in May 2004 as part of the collection of correspondence.