Author: White, John Blake
Biography:
WHITE, John Blake (1781-1859: ancestry.com)
He was born near Eutaw Springs SC, the son of Elizabeth (Bourquin) and Blake Leay White. He began the study of law in the state capital, Columbia, but in 1800 broke off to go to London to become a pupil of the American painter Benjamin West. Washington Allston (q.v.), also from South Carolina, who had just graduated from Harvard, overlapped with White in West's studio. In 1805 White would marry his friend's relative Elizabeth Allston (1779-1817), whom he had met in Boston in 1804 when he tried without success to establish himself as an artist there. They settled in Charleston; he completed his studies and was called to the bar in 1808 but also found time to write two plays for the Charleston theatre, Foscariand (in prose) The Mysteries of the Castle (1807), followed by Modern Honor a few years later. (A later play entitled "The Triumph of Liberty," said to have been performed in Virginia in 1819, does not appear to have been published.) The couple had four children. After the death of his first wife, he married Anne Rachel O'Driscoll (1797-1849) in 1819 and had seven more. Although White's legal practice flourished and he was more than once elected to the state legislature, he was and is known primarily as a painter of history paintings and portraits. Two of his battle scenes hung in the state Senate in Columbia, four more in the Capitol in Washington DC. As one of the obituaries put it, he "devoted a long life of elegant leisure to the intellectual and artistic improvement of his native city." He died in Charleston and was buried in the cemetery of St. Philip's Episcopal Church. (anceestry.com 31 Jan. 2021; Appleton; DAB; Times-Picayune [New Orleans] 30 Aug. 1859) HJ
Other Names:
- John B. White