Portrait of Webster Added to Collection

THROUGH the generosity of Mr. T. M. Evans of Pittsburgh and New York, Dartmouth College has been presented with a valuable oil portrait of Daniel Webster painted by Chester Harding about 1828. This newest addition to the College's outstanding collection of oil portraits of Webster will hang in the main hall of Baker Library beside a portrait of Webster's wife, Grace, also done by Harding a year or two before the painting given by Mr. Evans. The painting of Mrs. Webster was acquired in 1953 as a gift from the William L. Bryant Foundation of Springfield, Vt., administered by William J. Bryant '25.

The artist Chester Harding (1792-1866) returned from Europe in 1826 and quickly became a very popular painter in Boston. One of his most successful portraits was the College's 1827 painting of Grace Fletcher Webster, which depicts the statesman's first wife in the dress she wore in 1825 when her husband delivered his celebrated address at the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument, in the presence of an enormous gathering that included General Lafayette. Webster was so pleased with the portrait of his wife that he volunteered to sit for Harding and did so the following year for the first of a series of portraits of him done by Harding. The oil presented by Mr. Evans, showing Webster at the age of 46 or so, is not the first of the Harding series but is one done soon after the first portrait.

Mr. T. M. Evans (l) and Orton H. Hicks'21, Vice President of the College, withthe Daniel Webster portrait recently presented to the College by Mr. Evans.