The artist;[1] purchased from his estate, 14 November 1820, by Ethan Allen Greenwood [1779-1856], Boston;[2] sold 1839 to Moses Kimball [1809-1895], Boston, with the contents of the New England Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts;[3] sold December 1891 to (Samuel P. Avery Jr., New York);[4] sold 1892 to William Frederick Havemeyer [1850-1913], New York.[5] National Democratic Club, New York;[6] sold 15 December 1922 to (Art House, Inc., New York);[7] Thomas B. Clarke [1848-1931], New York; his estate; sold as part of the Clarke collection 29 January 1936, through (M. Knoedler & Co., New York), to The A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh; gift 1940 to NGA.
[1] Ethan Allen Greenwood, John R. Penniman, and William M.S. Doyle, "Inventory of the estate of Edward Savage, late of Princeton in the County of Worcester deceased, lying and being in Boston in the County of Suffolk," 12 September 1817, no. 51 (with his paintings of Christopher Columbus and Liberty). This inventory of the contents of Savage's museum in Boston is filed with the inventory of his property in Princeton and his administrator's accounts at the Worcester County Probate Court, Worcester, Massachusetts (photocopy, NGA curatorial file, photocopy courtesy of Georgia Barnhill, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester), series A, case 52130; see Louisa Dresser, "Edward Savage, 1761-1817," Art in America 40, no. 4 (Autumn 1952), 157-158, n. 5, and Georgia Brady Barnhill, "'Extracts from the Journals of Ethan A. Greenwood': Portrait Painter and Museum Proprietor," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 103, part 1 (October 1993), 97.
[2] Bill of sale signed by Savage's son Edward Savage, Jr. (1795-1858), Boston, administrator of his father's estate; Ethan Allen Greenwood Papers, American Antiquarian Society (photocopy, NGA curatorial file, courtesy of Georgia Barnhill). The price of $1,000 was for "One Marble Statue of the Venus de Medicis and the large Painting of the Washington Family." On Greenwood see Barnhill 1993, 91-178.
[3] Watkins 1917, 127-128; according to Ryan 1915, 1-2, Moses Kimball (1809-1895) bought a large part of the collection of the New England museum when he was "about thirty" and opened the new Boston Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts in 1841. A draft of a document written by Greenwood in 1839, which would have transferred ownership of the museum to Robert Gould Shaw and the Reverend Edward T. Taylor, is in the Ethan Allen Greenwood Papers, American Antiquarian Society, quoted in Barnhill 1993, 101. This transfer did not take place.
