John Hill Morgan Research Files

The collection documents John Hill Morgan's research on George Washington portraits and other early American works. Papers date from 1920-1944, with a few printed items dating from 1892-1913.

The collection includes correspondence; photographs; handwritten and typed notes; annotated volumes; clippings from magazines, newspapers, exhibition catalogues and auction sales catalogues; Morgan's notes, narratives and some drafts of his writings; postcards; and photostats and typed transcriptions of reference materials such as diaries and letters. In addition to the approximately 500 black and white photographs of portraits of George Washington, hundreds of representations of Washington portraits can be found in the clippings and postcards.

The files are organized in six series, which correspond to Morgan's original filing system: Series I: The Life Portraits of George Washington and Their Replicas, 1920-1944; Series II: Additions to The Life Portraits of George Washington and Their Replicas, 1929-1944; Series III: George Washington Portraits - Not from Life, 1922-1942; Series IV: Gilbert Stuart, 1920-1944; Series V: Shepard-Hughes-Danton Fakes, 1922-1938; and, Series VI: George Washington Portraits - General Research, 1926-1944.

The bulk of the collection contains Morgan's research and correspondence for his 1931 book, The Life Portraits of George Washington and Their Replicas, which he co-authored with Mantle Fielding. Morgan's research for this book includes individual files for the majority of portraits represented in the publication. Photographs, notes, clippings and correspondence document the provenance, condition, ownership and attribution of the works. Morgan continued to add to these files after the book was published, and many annotated pages from the volumes are included in the files.

Also of note is Morgan's research on Gilbert Stuart, which includes reference materials and the annotated volumes of Gilbert Stuart: An Illustrated Descriptive List of His Works (1926) by Lawrence Park, to which Morgan contributed a biography of Stuart. Additional research in the collection concerns portraits of George Washington not included in Morgan's or Park's books, and fakes of early American oils and drawings. The collection contains information on Frank Bayley's sale of a Washington portrait later determined to be a copy (in Series IV: Gilbert Stuart), and a series of fake drawings sold in the 1920s and early 1930s by a man using various aliases, including George J. Shepard, Ferdinand Danton and John J. Hughes (in Series V: Shepard-Hughes-Danton Fakes). The drawings were reputed to be by, among others, Thomas Sully, Gilbert Stuart, John Trumbull, Charles Willson Peale, and Rembrandt Peale.

Oversize documents are stored separately in Box 12. Reduced-size photocopies replace the originals in Boxes 1-11.