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The “Traylor” Miniature

This miniature (fig. 52) first appeared at the turn of the century in the possession of the Bendann Brothers, art dealers active in Baltimore.(100) Its exact origin is obscure, although the picture was reportedly acquired somewhere in Annapolis by W. E. Jones, a salesman acting on behalf of the Bendanns. In 1905 the miniature was consigned by Jones to J. J. English, Jr., of the Bell Book and Stationery Company on Main Street in Richmond, Virginia. It was purchased soon afterwards by the noted Poe collector Robert Lee Traylor.(101) The portrait eventually passed to Mr. Traylor's daughter, Mrs. Lewis Griffin Larus, after whose death in 1946 it was acquired by its present owners, the Poe Foundation of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum, Richmond.

The likeness was first reproduced in B. B. Minor's The Southern Literary Messenger, 1834-1864 (New York: Neale Publishing Company, 1905). It was reprinted in James A. Harrison's Last Letters of Edgar Allan Poe to Sarah Helen Whitman (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1909), and the Valentine Museum's Richmond Portraits in an Exhibition of Makers of Richmond (Richmond: The Valentine Museum, 1949).

The miniature was formerly believed to have been painted from life, sometime between 1836 and 1839, when Poe was about nineteen. Early Poe scholars such as James A. Harrison accepted the likeness as completely authentic, but in 1926 James Southall Wilson dismissed it, without explanation, as “a synthetic picture.”(102) It is likely that Wilson was correct in rejecting the portrait. The likeness appears to have been derived from either of John Sartain's two engravings of the Osgood portrait — most probably the one he completed in 1885 (fig. 30). Although Sartain's engraving and the miniature are artistically dissimilar, the two images share a number of visual parallels that are too idiosyncratic to be the product of mere coincidence. The long side-whiskers seen in the engraving have been deleted in the miniature, but the cherubic mouth and oddly vacant stare remain identical in both portraits. The elongated nose is repeated in each picture, casting the same shadow onto the right cheek. Both hairlines are identical, and each likeness is distinguished by a serpentine lock of hair above the left temple. The torso seen in the Sartain engraving has been considerably altered in the miniature, but the silhouette formed by collar and shoulder runs parallel in both images.

Robert Lee Traylor seems to have had some doubts concerning the miniature's authenticity, but was unwilling to air them publicly. He was, in fact, somewhat misleading when discussing the origin of the portrait. In 1914, seven years after Traylor's death, J. H. Whitty explained in a letter to Poe biographer Mary E. Phillips:

Although it is best categorized as a derivative portrait, the “Traylor” miniature remains an undeniably charming work, resulting perhaps from a well-intentioned effort to create an accurate likeness of Poe as a young man. Indeed, it is painted with considerable skill, has a poignancy that is altogether lacking in John Sartain's 1885 engraving, and compares quite favorably with the extant descriptions of the young poet.

Addendum

Ton Fafianie discovered a relevant note in the Richmond Dispatch (Richmond, VA) for July 28, 1901 (whole no. 15,684, p. 10, near the bottom of col. 1):

Consequently, as he points out in his e-mail to the Poe Society (dated December 13, 2019), it is clear that Traylor had purchased the portrait in 1901 rather than in 1905.