Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/1180196
39 THE CAPITOL DOME Quincy Adams and the writings of Louisa Catherine Adams as a USCHS summer research intern, and learned about John Quincy Adams's relationship with slavery during the historian David Waldstreicher's book talk at the Society in July 2017. Ryan would like to thank all of the professionals that guided him throughout the internship and the production of this article, especially William C. diGia- comantonio, Lauren Borchard, and those who granted him the permissions to use the images and texts in this article. He fi nally would like to thank his family and friends for their unyielding support throughout the process. NOTES 1. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907; reprint, New York City, 1990), pp. 23–24, 44– 47. Bracketed text within all quotes represents this author's editorial insertions. Italicized text provides information for clarifi cation; roman text is intended to provide the best supposition for words or letters missing from the original source. 2. Sara Georgini, Household Gods: The Religious Lives of the Adams Family (New York City, 2019), autumn of 1818, he painted a bust portrait of JQA that disappointed the sitter (although it was used as the basis for many later, successful engravings). 5 Stuart's portrait of LCJA was no less disappointing to the family, but that may not have prevented them from hanging the couple's portraits in the White House during the last years of JQA's administration. 6 "Nobody likes it," LCJA admitted, "and Stuart is quite vexed." And yet, "It looks very much as I looked, like a woman who was just attacked by the fi rst chill of death and the features stiffning into torpor. . . . It speaks too much of inward suffering and a half broken heart to be an agreeable remem- brance. Mais n'import . . . ." Like her husband, LCJA was a poet at heart, and verses she wrote for her sons, to accompany the portrait, convey the same sentiment: Go fl atter'd image tell the tale / Of years long past away; Of faded youth, of sorrows wail, / Of times too sure decay . . . . 7 Her willingness to go on-record about those inner- most feelings—like her uninhibited musings about pol- itics, whether in 1808, 1820, or 1837—has given LCJA a "voice" that historians should heed whenever studying the most important relationship of her husband's life. NOTES 1. The Adamses' portraiture is such an important element in their legacy that the Adams Papers Edi- torial Project at the Massachusetts Historical Society decided to dedicate a separate series of volumes to the topic not long after it was assigned custody of the Adams Manuscript Trust by deed of gift in 1956. The second volume of that series, Andrew Oliver's Por- traits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife (Boston, 1970), is the source for much of the information cited here under the short title "Oliver, Portraits." 2. Oliver, Portraits, pp. 18, 25, 48–50. JQA and LCJA were captured together in silhouette on two later occasions: by the British-born New York artist William James Hubbard (1807–1862) in late 1828, during the couple's last few months in the White House; and by the sometimes-sign painter Jarvis F. Hanks (b. 1799) a few months later, early during the Adamses' temporary retirement on Meridian Hill in D.C. JQA was the sole subject of a piece done by the most famous silhouette artist working in America, French artist Auguste Edouart (1789–1861), in Wash- ington in 1841 (ibid., pp. 144–48, 212–17). 3. Oliver, Portraits, p. 50; Alexander Nemerov, "Without a Trace: The Art and Life of Martha Ann Honeywell," in Asma Naeem, ed., Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now (Princeton, NJ, 2018), p. 54. 4. Oliver, Portraits, pp. 91–106; Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, VA, 2000), pp. 165–68. 5. Oliver, Portraits, pp. 73–83. In addition to his 1818 bust portrait of JQA, Stuart began a more famous full-length portrait intended as a matching pendant to John Singleton Copley's portrait of John Adams (1783), both hanging at Harvard University since 1828. Stuart completed only the head before his death; the rest was completed by a young Thomas Sully (1783–1872). 6. William Kloss, Doreen Bolger, David Park Curry, John Wilmerding, and Betty C. Monkman, Art in the White House: A Nation's Pride (Washington, DC, 1992), pp. 44, 90. The supposition that Stuart's portraits had indeed hung in the White House was motivation to seek their return—made possible through the gift of their great-great-grandson John Quincy Adams, in 1971. 7. Oliver, Portraits, pp. 83–87.