Did a Real Portrait of John Proctor Ever Exist? the Truth Behind the Viral Drawings
Puritan New England maintained a deeply conflicted relationship with visual art. Governed by strict interpretations of the Second Commandment forbidding graven images, orthodox Puritan society viewed secular portraiture with suspicion. Modesty, piety, and economic restraint were civic requirements. Painting a likeness was viewed as an act of personal vanity, tolerated almost exclusively among royal governors, elite Boston clergy like Cotton Mather, and aristocratic transatlantic merchants who could afford London-trained limners.
John Proctor was a prosperous farmer and tavern keeper in Salem Farms (modern-day Peabody), but he was nowhere near wealthy enough to commission a portrait painter. Even if he possessed the wealth, commissioning an artist to capture a tavern owner’s likeness in rural Essex County would have drawn censure from church elders. The few New England portraits that survive from before 1700, such as the 1670 portrait of Elizabeth Eggington or the likeness of John Freake, depict the apex of Boston's ruling mercantile elite. Rural yeomen simply had no visual footprint.
