Hopkins, Stephen (1707 - 1785)
Role: First Chancellor of Rhode Island College (later Brown University)Dates:
Portrait Location: University Hall 312
Artist: Hagen, John Philip ()
Portrait Date: 1999
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 27
Framed Dimensions: 38
Brown Portrait Number: 275
Brown Historical Property Number: 2315
Stephen Hopkins is best remembered today as Rhode Island's nine-times-elected governor and signer of the Declaration of Independence, serving during the tumultuous years preceding the Revolutionary War. He was born in Providence, but his family moved to the countryside of Scituate to farm when he was a child. Hopkins entered public life there at the age of 23, serving in various functions and ultimately becoming president of the Scituate town council. From 1732 to 1752, he served in the Rhode Island House of Representatives, and then again from 1770 to 1775. In 1742 he moved to Providence and began dabbling in mercantile trade with the four Brown brothers, the town's leading merchant family. Public duty remained uppermost in his career, however, and he attended Colonial Congresses in 1754 and 1757 and the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1776, signing the Declaration of Independence during the latter session. Hopkins converted to Quakerism at the time of his second marriage in 1755, although he was later quietly turned out of the Society for refusing to manumit an elderly domestic slave. As a strict Quaker, he would not have been permitted to sign the Declaration, which led to war with England. Hopkins did nevertheless maintain an unpretentious Quaker lifestyle. While Hopkins was in Philadelphia at the 1776 Constitutional Convention, George Washington stayed in his home (now maintained as a house museum by The Society of Colonial Dames on Benefit St. in Providence), but legend has it that Hopkins's daughter refused her neighbor's offers to lend fine china and silver on which to serve him?these items being lacking in the household?claiming that what was good enough for Governor Hopkins was certainly acceptable for General Washington. On June 3, 1763, Hopkins observed the transit of Venus along with Benjamin West and Joseph Brown, one of the four Brown brothers and later an astronomy professor at the College. John Adams, who had served with Hopkins on a naval committee, had remarked upon the disciplined and erudite nature of his character. Although he was self-educated, Adams noted that Hopkins read Greek, Roman, and British history as well as the poetry of Milton and Pope.
As a Quaker Stephen Hopkins shunned vanity, and never had a portrait painted of himself. As a signer of the Declaration of Independence, however, his likeness was included in John Trumbull's famous post-Revolutionary painting "Signers of the Declaration of Independence." Hopkins was already deceased when Trumbull travelled to Rhode Island in search of a likeness to include in his group portrait of the signers, although the governor's nephew was considered by the family to be a "dead-ringer" of his uncle and sat in as the model for Trumbull's sketch. In the 1860s John Russell Bartlett, Secretary of State for the State of Rhode Island, started collecting portraits of the state's early governors to display in the state houses. In the absence of any old family portrait to copy, Bartlett commissioned a new painting of Stephen Hopkins based on the face identified as Hopkins in Trumbull's group portrait. Not until 1971 was it discovered that some of the figures in the group portrait had been misidentified, including that of Stephen Hopkins. The likeness portrayed in the 1860s portrait was, in fact, that of Quaker John Dickinson of Pennsylvania. John Hagen, painting instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, was chosen among 35 artists by the state in 1980 to paint a new portrait of the real Stephen Hopkins. Hagan relied primarily on the original sketch of Hopkins's nephew made by Trumbull, which differed somewhat from his image in the group painting. For Brown's version of the portrait, commissioned in 1999, Hagan made subtle changes to the background, such as seating Hopkins in a Spanish chair owned by the governor and now used by Brown presidents at Commencement. He also placed a view of University Hall in the window rather than the Providence Colony House pictured in the state's version. Hopkins was chancellor of the college when University Hall was constructed just up the hill from his house.