Elton, Romeo (1790-1870)
Role: Professor of Latin and GreekDates: 1824-1843
Portrait Location: Library Annex
Artist: Lincoln, James Sullivan (1811-1888)
Portrait Date: 1863
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 29 1/2 x 24 1/2 in. (74.93 x 62.23 cm.)
Framed Dimensions: 43 1/2 x 38 1/2 in. (110.49 x 97.79 cm.)
Brown Portrait Number: 43
Brown Historical Property Number: 1393
Romeo Elton was born in 1790 to a Connecticut farming family. He matriculated at Brown University at the age of twenty, and graduated three years later, in 1813. Elton taught school while preparing for the ministry; he was ordained in the Baptist church in 1817 and assumed the pastorship first of Second Baptist Church in Newport, and later, of another Baptist congregation in Vermont. When a professorship of Latin and Greek became available at Brown University, the current president not only recommended Elton for the job, but also sponsored two years of study in Europe for the Brown alumnus. He spent the years from 1825-1827 in travel and study and began to teach at Brown in late 1827. Elton taught at Brown until 1845. He was notable not only for his extremely unromantic appearance (the short, dumpy, unprepossessing little man was nicknamed "Bump" by generations of students) but also for his genial nature, which at times prevented him from exercising the full authority a professor perhaps needed to control a class of exuberant undergraduates. He was a great favorite among his students: as one commented, "whether he was a strong classical scholar or not we could never find out , for he was so absurdly good-natured and so punctiliously polite and of such confirmed mauvaise honte withal that we did much as we pleased in his class-room." Fortunately, Elton did not appear concerned by his students' antics, and was known to lecture serenely as on pleasant days they decamped through the large windows of the ground-floor classroom. Following his retirement, Elton moved to England, and did not return to the United States (save for a single visit) until 1869. He died the next year at the age of eighty, having lived much longer than a man with his consistently tubercular lungs could have expected?no doubt his pacific character ameliorated any constitutional defects suffered by the pleasant little professor.
This painting was executed around 1863 by James Sullivan Lincoln, who worked from a photograph. It was commissioned by Professor Elton's pupils and friends. The artist was born in 1811 in Taunton, Massachusetts. When he was fourteen, he was apprenticed to a Providence engraver. He began painting as well, and eventually became the first President of the Providence Art Club. After 1837, his work consisted entirely of portraits. He died in Providence in 1888.