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Who Painted The Portrait Of Mary Gardner Coffin ? BY MARGARET GREENE
IN MARCH 1924 1 the Nantucket Historical Association acquired an unsigned portrait of a woman identified since time remem bered as Mary Gardner Coffin. She and her husband Jethro Coffin were the first occupants of the house now known as the Oldest House on island. Though keeping in mind the eccentricities of tradition, there has never been any reason to doubt the identity of the sitter. For many years at Fair Street, the'portrait is now at the Peter Foulger Museum. Over the years, however, the identity of the painter has been subjected to constant if casual scrutiny, and it is our purpose to track the available commentary from the earliest to the present. It is helpful to begin with a few recorded dates, relating them throughout to this discussion; a rather cavalier disregard for the passage of time having characterized the attributions of the past and not so far past. According to the Vital Records of Nan tucket: 2 Coffin, Jethro, h. Mary . . s. Peter . . and Abigail, born 16,"9 mo. 1663 3 Coffin, Mary w. Jethro . . d. John and Priscilla . . 27 . . 5 mo. 1670 (in Salem) 4 Mary and Jethro were married in 1686,5 making her a very young bride of 16. Starbuck 6 records that all eight of their children were born on Nantucket between 1689 and some years after 1704. And then in 1707 the Oldest House was sold to Nathaniel Paddack.7 Then the following entries come from the Annals of the Town of Mendon,8 in the Uxbridge-Whitinsville area of Massachusetts: p. 167 . . Boston the 27th. of May 1713. The petition of Jethro Coffin, of Mendon, Mumbly Sheweth, that whereas the Gen eral Court of the late Colony of the Massachusetts, in the year Nantucket Historical Association Files. No. 2685 March 1924. Vital Records of Nantucket to the Year 1850 N.E. Historic Genealogical Society, Boston. 3 V.R.N. 1925 BIRTHS Vol. 1 p. 286. 4 V.R.N. 1926 BIRTHS Vol. 2 p. 57. 5 Oldest House on Nantucket Island, Tristram Coffin, Ed. Poughkeepsie, N.Y. 1911 p. 28. 6 History of Nantucket, Alex. Starbuck, Tuttle-Rutland, Vt. 1969 p. 703. 7 Oldest House, p. 30. 1
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