Lemuel Shaw, Lost and Found

• Published in: Leviathan (Hempstead, N.Y.) N.Y.), 2019-03, Vol.21 (1), p.181-184
• Main Author: Martin, Ross
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: American literature; Archives & records; Biographies; Copley, John Singleton (1738-1815); Courts; Libraries; Literary devices; Melville, Herman (1819-1891); Museums; Provenance; State court decisions
• ISSN: 1525-6995; 1750-1849; 1750-1849
• DOI: 10.1353/lvn.2019.0010

Credit is due to Jeffrey Croteau, Director of Library & Archives at the Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library in Lexington, Massachusetts, who, working independently from me, was the first to bring the Boston Globe article to Allen's attention. The latter, "by an unknown artist," likely came from Samuel Savage Shaw's estate before 1916, by which time it had been "recently hung in the Suffolk County Court House" ("The Proceedings at the Meeting of the Bar at the Birthplace of Chief Justice Shaw, West Barnstable, Mass., August 4, 1916," 14). [...]the portrait was one of the many items belonging to Chief Justice Shaw that made their way back to the Courthouse in the decades after his death, unmarked because no one at that time could have imagined a day, especially so soon, when the illustrious Judge's face would be forgotten. ________ For further reading, see Frederic Hathaway Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts: 1830–1860 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1918); John T. Morse, "The Bench and Bar in Boston," The Memorial History of Boston, ed.