Currently not on view
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), President (1758),
1860
after Joseph Badger, American, 1708–1765
Jonathan Edwards, elected president five days after the death of his son-in-law, Aaron Burr Sr., was a popular choice. A friend of the College since its inception, he was the most eminent American philosopher-theologian of his time. Initially, Edwards refused to take on “such a new and great business in the decline of life,” explaining that he considered himself deficient in health, temperament, and some branches of learning. He was finally persuaded by a group of ministers that it was his duty to accept. He arrived in Princeton in late January 1758, where he preached in the College chapel and gave out questions in divinity to the senior class to study before coming together to discuss them—an 18th-century seminar.
As author of the celebrated work, The Freedom of the Will, he was respectfully received by the undergraduates, who spoke of the “light and instruction” he communicated.
He died only two months after taking office of a fever following a smallpox inoculation and was buried in a special corner of the Princeton cemetery called “the President’s Lot.”
More About This Object
Information
1860
Oil on canvas
76.2 x 63.5 cm (30 x 25 in.)
frame: 97.8 x 85.1 cm (ca. 38 1/2 x 33 1/2 in.)
Princeton University, gift of great-grandsons of Jonathan Edwards
on verso: copy from original in possession of S[arah] P[ierpont] Edwards of Hartford, by. H.A. Loop, New York 1860"
- Donald D. Egbert, Princeton Portraits, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947)., fig. 222, pp 317-329
- George C. Groce and David H. Wallace, New York Historical Society's dictionary of artists in America, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957)., p. 127-128
- Glenn B. Opitz, ed., Mantle Fielding's dictionary of American painters, sculptors & engravers, (Poughkeepsie, NY: Apollo, 1986)., p. 553
- Charles F. Hickox III and Andrew C. Laviano, "William Paterson", Journal of Supreme Court history 17, no. 1 (Dec., 1992)., p. 53-61
- Peter Hastings Falk, ed., Who was who in American art, 1564-1975: 400 years of artists in America, (Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1999)., p. 649
- Patricia J. Tracy, "Jonathan Edwards," American National Biography Online, (Feb. 2000).
- Kathleen Wagner Starrett, "The rights of conscience: the Puritan heritage of the founder of the Christian Science Church: part 2", Library notes 14, no. 2 (Fall-Winter, 2006-2007)., 1-12
- Karl Kusserow et al., Inner sanctum: memory and meaning in Princeton’s Faculty Room at Nassau Hall, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2010)., p. 60, fig. 12 (illus.)
- Johnathan M. Yeager, ed., Early evangelicalism: a reader, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013)., fig. 9.1; p. 61
- William Kostlevy, "Not concerning the heart but the life," Christian history 116 (2016): p. 37., p. 37 (illus.)
