Samuel Lewis (1753/4 – 1822)
A Deception
watercolour and ink on paper
In 2005, James Mitchell (of John Mitchell Fine Paintings) discovered in England an unusual trompe l’oeil card rack picture. There was no attribution but judging from the text of the papers depicted and the various dates within the picture it was estimated to have been painted in the 1780s. With the assistance of Professor William H. Gerdts, the foremost authority on American still life painting, it transpired that the trompe l’oeil was by Samuel Lewis (1753-1822) a cartographer, drawing master and active member of the Philadelphia art world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Gerdts had some years earlier reattributed the earliest known American card rack painting to Lewis (Philadelphia Museum of Art, accession no. 2012-172-163), which for nearly two centuries had been assumed to be the work of Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825).
Until our picture was discovered, it was not known that Lewis had in fact been born and worked in London until he emigrated to Philadelphia in 1794. By discovering this London period Deception (as works of illusion were called in Georgian England) the missing link was made between the rack paintings of European artists such as Cornelius Gysbrechts (1625-1675) and Evert Collier (1642-1708) and the beginnings of the trompe l’oeil tradition in American art that flourished in the nineteenth century.
That Deception was bought by an American collector and is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (accession no. 2008.28.1). For such a fascinating and rare artist, it was hoped that there were yet other pictures to be discovered. Now, happily, seventeen years on a third Deception by Lewis has emerged. Immediately comparable in style and size to the Washington example, it follows the same criss-cross pattern of ribbons across a board, with cards tucked behind them and overlapping one another. As in the two others, the artist has subtly included his signature on the right side of the painting, disguised as a receipt for his wife or mother (reads Mrs Lewis). A seemingly random variety of papers cover the picture, including coach, lottery and theatre tickets, playing cards, sheet music, advertisements, a copy of The Public Ledger and the 1760 edition of Rider’s British Merlin. The deliberate inclusion of words such a ‘imitations’ and ‘verities’ on some of the papers emphasize the picture’s device as a visual deception. Lewis displays his masterful ability to mimic different type faces and calligraphic styles, while furthering the illusion by contrasting them with his own handwriting done in gall ink that has bled into the paper.
Aside from the surface visual illusion and wordplay, is there a deeper puzzle to be solved? In 2007 the historian Julie Flavell published an article entitled A Trick on the Eye for the BBC History magazine, and revealed that the Washington Deception did indeed have a deeper narrative. She discovered that Lewis’ brother William had been on trial for bank fraud, and was found guilty and hanged at Tyburn on 30th November 1774. All the names mentioned in the picture were involved in the defence at the trial, and the use of playing cards and a promissory note in the picture suggested that gambling depts may have driven William Lewis to so reckless a crime. A Mr. Jacob Roberts of 55 Chandos Street, Covent Garden is a recurring character referenced in both Washington’s and our current Deception. Roberts was the Lewis family’s landlord and acted as a character witness for William at his trial. Indeed, 55 Chandos Street is registered as Samuel Lewis’s address in the exhibition records from 1791, seventeen years after the trial, so we can assume that Jacob Roberts was a longstanding acquaintance of the Lewis family. The reference to his name is on a theatre ticket in the top right corner of the painting shown as ‘For the Benefit of Mr Roberts’. If the hidden narrative of the Washington picture explores the sad tale of William Lewis’s death, then this pendant perhaps alludes to a happier tale. The sheet music in the lower right for the ‘Married Man’, the adverts for perfume and the conspicuous use of the words ‘wine’ and ‘parties’ suggest a more celebratory narrative. In this context the playing cards and lottery tickets presumably suggest that fortune turned for the better.
In 1794 Lewis left London for Philadelphia to pursue a successful career as a mapmaker and painter of Deceptions, as contemporary exhibition catalogues testify, although only one Deception from this American period is known today. Lewis’s most famous work was the map of Lewis and Clark’s track (1814), a reworking of the original maps drawn by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark on the first ever official expedition to the Pacific Coast (1804-06). He was an active member of the Philadelphia art world, exhibiting at the short-lived Columbianum Association in 1795 where he was also its secretary, and later exhibited at The Society of Artists of the United States held at the Pennsylvania Academy of the United States. At the time of his death in 1822 he was married with children and grandchildren. The convention of the card rack painting in Philadelphia flourished through the Peale dynasty of artists and reached its climax in the work of William Michael Harnett and John Frederick Peto in the 1880s. Having established that it was in fact Samuel Lewis who introduced this specific genre of painting into American Art, it makes this exciting discovery of a third Deception by such an early and influential artist all the more important. As the late William Gerdts summarised, ‘Samuel Lewis must be recognised, then, as a significant figure in the Philadelphia art world of his time, and an artist who pioneered in the field of American trompe l’oeil painting’.