This portrait shows a 33-year-old Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, not long after he began teaching at Harvard College as the Smith Professor of Modern Languages. The dark, mottled background and Longfellow’s intense, almost piercing gaze combine to create a portrait that conveys a moody, somewhat mysterious atmosphere.
The artist was Cephas Giovanni Thompson. Thompson was born in Middleborough, Massachusetts in 1809. His father, also named Cephas, was a portraitist who made his living traveling along almost the entirety of the east coast of the U.S., producing portraits of wealthy merchants and their family members, among others. The younger Cephas followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming popular in his own right as a portrait artist. At various times he based himself in Providence, New York City, and Boston, and he spent most of the 1850s living and working in Rome. While in Rome, Thompson became a close friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was a Bowdoin College classmate and friend of Henry W. Longfellow.
This portrait, done in 1840, was the first of several of Longfellow begun by Thompson. Longfellow’s own journal entries indicate that two others were started, both in 1850. One seems to have been left unfinished, while the current whereabouts of the other is unknown. Thompson and Longfellow were related, sharing a great-great-great-grandfather, making them fourth cousins to each other. Despite the family connection, Longfellow apparently did not enjoy the experience of sitting for the artist. Henry wrote in a February 1850 journal entry “Sat to Thompson for portrait. What a seccatura [nuisance]! Why did I consent?” After another sitting in June 1850, Longfellow recorded “Thompson came to take my portrait, and we worked at it bravely all the morning in our shirt sleeves. . . . And a duller day I have not had for a long time.”
This portrait, the first by Thompson of Longfellow, was well regarded by at least one of his associates. After an 1848 visit to Thompson’s studio in Boston Henry’s remarked that his friend Cornelius Felton thought that “the portrait he [Thompson] made of me some years ago the best that has been done.” It was also used as the basis for an engraving of Longfellow that featured in The Poets and Poetry of America published by E.L. Carey & Hart of Philadelphia in 1842. The Longfellow family felt it was worthy of exhibition as well. Since it was made the portrait has been hung in various rooms throughout the Brattle Street home, including the dining room, and the central hall stairway where it is displayed today. For part of 2025 the portrait will be on display at the Bowdoin College Art Museum’s exhibition Poetic Truths: Hawthorne, Longfellow, and American Visual Culture, 1840-1880.