Carter, Benjamin Bowen (1771-1831)
Role:Dates:
Portrait Location: Norwood House 110
Artist: Alexander, Francis (1800-1881)
Portrait Date:
Medium: Oil on panel
Dimensions: 25
Framed Dimensions: 32 1/2
Brown Portrait Number: 34
Brown Historical Property Number: 1173
Benjamin Bowen Carter was a doctor, a sailor, a linguist, and a scientist. He was born in Providence in 1771. The family occupied a comfortable place in post-Revolutionary Providence society; his father, John Carter, published the Providence Gazette, a position which gave him sufficient social and financial standing to see his daughter, Ann, marry the wealthy scion of a prominent family of merchants, Nicholas Brown (the benefactor after whom Brown University is named). John Carter's son, Benjamin Bowen Carter, as befitted a youth of his skills and position, attended what would become Brown University. He entered the school at the age of eleven, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1786. He received a Master of Arts from the school after three additional years of study, then, having attained his majority, relocated to Philadelphia to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. After his training was complete, he practiced for a time in Woodstock, Connecticut, but his restless spirit sent him traveling through the Southeast, to Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. These attractions palling, Carter returned to Providence in 1798 and immediately took a place as a ship's doctor on the Ann and Hope , a vessel owned by his brother-in-law Nicholas Brown's mercantile firm, Brown and Ives. This ship was destined for the rich ports of Canton, China. Carter's journals of his first voyage give an interesting picture of seafaring life at the turn of the nineteenth century. His ship rescued a castaway, was chased and fired upon by hostile vessels of French and British origin, and was, of course, swept by the occasional epidemic. It was Carter's pride that although the ship's crew contracted malaria (brought on, he thought, not only by the close quarters in which they lived and by the dirty water which they drank, but also by eating such exotic fare as heavy oyster suppers, oranges and bananas), he lost only one man during the voyage.
Carter continued his profession as ship's doctor for several years. Not only was this work intellectually enriching (he learned Chinese and enjoys the reputation today of being the first American to speak and read the language) but he was also able to profit substantially from the quantities of tea, silk, and satin which he was allowed to import personally. Carter's voyages took him not only to China, but also to places such as Australia and, of course, many European locales, including the Netherlands, where he was received as a fellow intellectual and scientist at the University of Leyden (a school where all lectures were in Latin, which led Carter to deplore the lack of that language in American medical training). In 1807, Carter retired from the sea, and lived first in London and then in Paris, spending his time in study and writing. He returned to the United States after an eleven-year absence, and spent the years until his death in New York City, where he died in 1831. He did not marry and had no children.
This portrait was a bequest to Brown from the estate of Benjamin Bowen Carter's sister, Elizabeth Danforth, the widow of Brown alumnus Walter R. Danforth. The artist, Francis Alexander, was born in Killingly, Connecticut, in 1800. After training in New York, Alexander painted in Providence in the 1820s before setting up a studio in Boston and achieving great popularity there as a fashionable portrait artist during the 1830s and 1840s. In 1853, he moved to Florence, Italy, where he collected Italian art and fostered the talent of his daughter, who under the name Francesca Alexander attracted the patronage of John Ruskin. Alexander died in Italy in 1880.