[OCCOM (Samson)] & CHAMBERLIN (Mason), after.

The Reverend Samson Occom,

THE MOHEGAN MINISTER IN LONDON

The First Indian Minister that ever was in Europe, & who accompanied the Revs Nathanl Whitaker D.D. in an application to Great Britain for charities to support ye Revd Dr Wheelock’s Indian Academy, & Missionaries among ye Native Savages of N. America.

Mezzotint measuring 365 by 260mm. A very good copy, trimmed close to the plate, a little toned with some minor creases. London, Published according to the Act of Parliament, Henry Parker, at No. 82 in Cornhill, 20 September, 1768.

£25,000.00

A rare and important mezzotint of Mohegan writer, minister, and teacher Samson Occom (1723-92). This print is after Mason Chamberlin’s (1727-1787) portrait of Occom, which was painted during his visit to the British Isles in 1766 as part of a fund-raising tour at the behest of his mentor Eleazar Wheelock.

Occom (also Occum) had studied under Wheelock for four years before being ordained into the Presbyterian church, and besides his understanding of scripture and theology, he had significant knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew. He was accompanied on his trip to Britain by the Rev. Nathaniel Whitaker, a white American minister who served as both companion and chaperone. Occom believed that his efforts abroad were to benefit the Indian Charity School in Lebanon Connecticut, and this makes him the earliest recorded Indigenous missionary to travel from America to Great Britain.

Chamberlin was a founding member of the Royal Academy, most famous for his 1762 depiction of Benjamin Franklin, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The original painting of Samson Occom is lost. The mezzotint by John Spillsbury was produced a few months after Occom’s return to America in 1768.

Occom fits into a long lineage of Indigenous people, particularly Americans, who travelled against the tide of colonisation in the years before the American Revolution. Often diplomatic emissaries sent to seek audience with the regent, or captives exhibited as curiosities, Occom’s status as a minister and preacher set him apart as a new type of visitor. “Unlike so many of his predecessors who crossed the Atlantic to see Great Britain’s famous places and mingle with its eminent officials, Occom was of humble background - not from a prominent family in a major tribe, not a noted warrior or noted spokesman for his people. This impoverished schoolmaster and itinerant preacher had served equally impoverished northeastern American natives. Yet despite modest beginnings, chronic poor health, and recurrent penury, Occom’s visit to England, Scotland, and Ireland was remarkable for its duration - about six times the length of most eighteenth-century Indian sojourns - and its financial success. Between February 1766 and April 1768, Occom’s efforts, combined with those of his Anglo-American companions, brought Wheelock’s school nearly £12,000. Wheelock would spend much of that windfall on the education of young Indians, but to Occom’s profound dismay, he spent more of it to establish Dartmouth College, which almost exclusively enrolled students of English descent” (Vaughan, 191).

The image shows Occom bridging two cultures, dressed in the clothes of a colonial American minster, gesturing to the word of God in the open Bible on a lectern before him. Mounted on the wall above are the bow and arrow, a symbol of his Native identity, notably positioned behind Occom, as if to nod to a past that his salvation (and education) has enabled him to move beyond. This idea of civilisation and redemption through scripture ties into the Great Awakening teachings of figures like George Whitefield, with whom Occom lodged during his stay in London. Benjamin Franklin also stayed with Whitefield and the two may have overlapped.

Occom’s representation differs significantly from other contemporary portraiture of Indigenous subjects. Perhaps the two most famous examples are George Romney’s painting of Mohawk diplomat Joseph Brant, and Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of Mai, the Ra’itean voyager who travelled to England from Tahiti with Captain Cook. Both painted c. 1776, the portrait of Brant shows him in striking “Indian Dress”, a combination of Native and European garb including a long white shirt and feathered headdress, which emphasised his intercultural position, whilst simultaneously exoticising his difference. Indeed, contemporary reports suggest that whilst in Britain, Brant mostly wore European attire, and as such it was an active choice for him to be depicted in this way. Mai on the other hand (known as Omai in contemporary sources) was situated by Reynolds in an idealized exotic landscape, his flowing robes, bare feet and classic gesture all suggesting strong links with antiquity: “a thoroughly neo-classical version of the noble savage” (Smith).

In contrast, the portrait of Occom “reveals the visual manifestation of his politesse. This transformation from savagery to civilization is reinforced by the ease with which Occom’s appearance conforms to the conventions of ministerial portraiture of the colonies, as can be seen through a comparison with a printed portrait of the Reverend Cotton Mather by Peter Pelham from a generation earlier […] The Occom print reminds us of an important aspect of colonial relations that has been analyzed at length by Frantz Fanon: the ideology of racial difference upon which colonial domination is based is essentially visual, based on recognizable stereotypes. This fact helps explain the proliferation of images of Native people in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries that work to document their essential otherness” (Hutchinson, 217-218).

One of the reasons Occom’s visit could span such a duration, and that in spite of ongoing health issues he was able to return home, was the fact that he was inoculated against smallpox shortly after his arrival. This acquired immunity allowed him to travel widely, delivering over 300 sermons in every corner of the British Isles, without succumbing to the infectious disease that killed so many of his predecessors.

London was overwhelming in its excess to Occom, who recorded the following impression of his first Sunday there: “Such confusion as I never Dreamt of - there was Some at Churches, Singing & Preaching, in the Streets some Cursing Swaring & Damning one another, others was hollowing, Whestling, talking giggling, & Laughing, & Coaches and footmen passing and repassing, Crossing and Cross-Crossing, and the poor Begars Praying Crying, and Beging upon their knees” (Vaughan, 196).

In spite of the great success of Occom’s mission, after his return to Boston relations between himself and Wheelock soon soured. Alongside Wheelock’s controversial decision to attribute funds raised to the education of non-Native students, he also broke the promise he made to take proper care of Occom’s family during his absence, allowing his wife and children to fall into poverty. Despite the break from Wheelock, Occom remained active as a clergyman, and went on to co-found the Brothertown Indian tribe in New York. Formed in the wake of the American Revolutionary War, the Brothertown Indian Nation brought together likeminded members of multiple Algonquian-speaking communities. When the Indian Removals escalated in the nineteenth century, they were the first to accept the United States government’s offer of citizenship and allotment of communally owned land. As a result of this, the tribe is still struggling for Federal recognition.

Occom is perhaps best known for his A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, An Indian, first published in 1772, and going through at least nineteen subsequent editions. He would go on to write the first extant autobiography by a Native American author, as well as a pamphlet of songs and hymns. Occom’s autobiographical sketch survived in manuscript, and was not published in his lifetime. Until recently it was held in the archives of Dartmouth College, but in 2022 Occom’s papers were repatriated to the Mohegan Tribe.

This print is rare. We have located copies at Dartmouth, the Hood Museum, two copies at the British Museum (one before letters), Yale University Art Gallery, and Princeton (before letters). Rare Book Hub records 5 instances of sale: O’Shaughnessy 1916, Maggs 1935 (Catalogue 615, item 27), Bloomsbury 2007 (before letters) & 2009 (trimmed to image with later additions stuck on), and finally Christie’s 2022 (before letters) in the William S. Reese sale, which made $23,940.

Dartmouth also have what they describe as an “early American lithograph … evidently a copy from the mezzotint engraving” with the slightly different title “The Reverend Sampson Occom”. The American Antiquarian Society also only hold a later lithographed copy with the same title, dated by them c.183-?

Vaughan, A.T. Transatlantic Encounters: American Indians in Britain, 1500-1776. (Cambridge, 2006); Smith, B, & Joppien, R., The Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages … (Yale, 1988); Hutchinson, “‘The Dress of his Nation’: Romney’s Portrait of Joseph Brant” in Winterthur Portfolio. Vol 45 No. 2/3. (Chicago, 2011).

Stock No.
256044
This item is liable for VAT for customers in the UK.