Judson, Adoniram (1788-1850)
Role:Dates:
Portrait Location: Unlocated
Artist: Healy, George P.A. (1813-1894)
Portrait Date: 1846
Medium: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 25 1/2
Framed Dimensions:
Brown Portrait Number: 5
Brown Historical Property Number: 2227
Adoniram Judson was the son of a Congregationalist minister from Massachusetts. He graduated from Brown University in 1807 at the age of nineteen, having abandoned his Christianity for Deism while in college. After his graduation, he opened a school in Massachusetts and published several textbooks, and set out to enjoy the life of an intellectual and well-connected young man, traveling and writing. While he was on a trip, however, he made an overnight stay at a lodge, where he could hear from his room the very vocal death agonies of an ill fellow-traveler. The next morning, he was horrified to find that the deceased had been the classmate who most encouraged him to abandon the religion of his youth. This shocking experience sent Judson back into the arms of the church. He went to Andover Theological Seminary and trained to become a missionary.
In 1813, he and his wife departed for what at the time was called Burma. Judson's first priority was to learn the language, which he did, embarking on massive projects to translate the Bible and key theological texts into local dialects. Of course, the missionaries could not avoid becoming involved in the political conflicts between the British and their Burmese colonial subjects. Beginning in the 1820s, the Judsons and their missionary colleagues were variously imprisoned as spies and tortured, or impressed into the service of both sides for their abilities as interpreters. During these years, Judson's wife and only child died. He nevertheless remained in Burma, and in 1835, remarried and proceeded to have eight more children, five of whom survived childhood. Judson's major intellectual project during these years was the creation of an English-Burmese dictionary, a project which kept him away from his native country for the rest of his life, except for brief visits made to alleviate his second wife's failing health. She died in the United States in 1845, and in 1846, Judson married for the third time and returned to Burma to complete his dictionary. He finished only the English-to-Burmese section of his work before his death aboard a ship in 1850. He was buried at sea. Brown University recognized his achievements by awarding him an honorary Doctor of Divinity in 1845. Following his death, his stepson and four of his sons attended Brown.
Judson's portrait was painted in 1846 by George Peter Alexander Healy, a very fashionable East Coast portrait artist during the mid-nineteenth century. It was probably created during Judson's sojourn in the United States following his wife's death. Healy (1813-1894) began painting professionally in Boston at the age of seventeen. He moved to France to study, and his work became popular among the royal families of both France and Great Britain. He returned to the United States in 1842 and painted such subjects as Abraham Lincoln, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Pope Pius X, Franz Liszt, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Louisa May Alcott. He spent his latter years in Europe and in Chicago, where he died in 1894.