Author: Mack, Ebenezer
Biography:
MACK, Ebenezer (1755-1826: ancestry.com)
Several men of the same name appear in New York City records of the period, some of them distinguished. But newspaper obituaries firmly establish the date of the death of "Dr Ebenezer Mack" in 1826. He was a literary late bloomer, known as an author for only two eccentric titles, the Cat-Fight of 1824 and an earlier "Anatomy in Rhyme" of which no published copy is recorded. Specialists in American art have however recently identified him--on the basis mainly of newspaper advertisements and city directories--with the portraitist Ebenezer Mack, born in Connecticut to Daniel and Elisabeth (Cary) Mack. The collector Michael Tormey argues plausibly, in a document posted on ancestry.com, that the same man enlisted in the Connecticut militia in 1775 but was captured by the British and imprisoned a few months later. After escaping from custody he worked as a painter in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, before turning to the practice of medicine in 1809. He may have moved to New York to be near his married younger brother Daniel, a grocer. He himself never married. (ancestry.com 31 Dec. 2019; Carrie Rebora Barratt and Lori Zabar, American Portrait Miniatures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art [2010] 62)