by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

Three hundred years after Benjamin Franklin’s birth, Americans are poised to celebrate his multifaceted genius: Franklin the politician, printer, postmaster, writer, scientist, and inventor. Benjamin Franklin, our quintessentially French hero? As historian Gordon S. Wood reminds us in his recent book, The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, “Franklin belonged to France before he belonged to America.” After all, Franklin spent nearly nine years as a diplomat in Paris negotiating and maintaining a political alliance between the United States and France. The popularity of the American cause in France—and the singularity of Franklin’s appearance there—won him unprecedented fame and immortalized his furrowed countenance, graying locks, and balding pate for posterity.

For all his powerful intellect and shrewd statesmanship, it was Franklin’s Everyman qualities that fascinated the French, who perceived America as a nation of farmer-philosophers. As Wood writes, “America in their eyes came to stand for all that 18th-century France lacked—natural simplicity, social equality, religious freedom, and rustic enlightenment.” Franklin, in turn, came to stand for all that America represented; his plain speech and dress gave him an air of homespun dignity that was lacking in the empty magnificence of the French court.

When he arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1776, Franklin stood out in “the costume of an American farmer: his hair lank and unpowdered, his round hat, his suit of brown wool contrasting with the sequined, embroidered suits, the powdered and scented hair of the courtiers of Versailles,” wrote Madame Campan, lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette.

On a previous visit to France in 1767, Franklin had worn conventional clothing, donning a wig and a fancy French-made suit for an audience with Louis XV. Upon his return nine years later, however, he dressed down, going about town in a plain brown suit and a marten fur cap he had acquired in Canada. Under his cap, Franklin wore his hair unpowdered and loose, rather than tied up in a queue or covered by a wig. Indeed, he suffered from a scalp condition that made wigs uncomfortable; Franklin ordered one for his audience with Louis XVI but abandoned it at the last minute. Instead, he met the king bareheaded and wearing a suit of plain velvet with no sword when swords, wigs, and embroidered suits were dictated by etiquette. This was not just a fashion statement, but a calculated political move; Franklin knew that he was his own best advertisement for his ambitious diplomatic agenda.

Far from being offended, Franklin’s aristocratic hosts were charmed. “No man in Paris was more fashionable, more sought-after than Doctor Franklin,” the royal portrait artist Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun testified. Indeed, coiffures à la Philadelphie and gowns of gris Américan soon adorned the ladies of the court. French artists, too, were fascinated by Franklin’s unconventional appearance. Whether clad in rustic furs or plain cloth and linen, he seemed the living embodiment of the democratic beliefs for which America was fighting—beliefs that were becoming increasingly popular among the French, who would overthrow their own king just a few years later, in 1789. Franklin complained: “I have at the request of Friends sat so much and so often to painters and Statuaries, that I am perfectly sick of it. I know of nothing so tedious as sitting hours in one fix’d posture.” But the demand for portraits of the American patriot was insatiable.

No artist captured Franklin’s physical and psychological likeness as successfully as Joseph-Siffrede Duplessis (1725–1802). His iconic portrait in oils was hailed as a masterpiece when it appeared in the Salon of 1779. One critic commented: “[Franklin’s] large forehead suggests strength of mind and his robust neck the firmness of his character. Evenness of temper is in his eyes and on his lips the smile of an unshakeable serenity.” Copies appeared for sale almost immediately. Franklin encouraged this; the portrait was a personal favorite, and reproductions saved him the trouble of sitting for other artists. More importantly, though, the portrait conveyed the deceptively unsophisticated image Franklin wished to project to the world. The Huntington’s pastel version, attributed to Jean Valade (1709–1787), is one of many replicas of the portrait made in the 1780s.

In addition to the pastel, the Huntington collections include two portrait medallions of Franklin, one in Sèvres porcelain and one in terracotta. The latter may be the one Franklin described in a letter to his daughter dated June 3, 1779:

The clay medallion of me you say you gave to Mr. Hopkinson was the first of its kind made in France. A variety of others have been made since of different sizes; some to be set in the lids of snuffboxes, and some so small as to be worn in rings; and the numbers sold are incredible. These, with the pictures, busts and prints, (of which copies upon copies are spread everywhere,) have made your father’s face as well known as that of the moon, so that he durst not do anything that would oblige him to run away, as his phiz would discover him wherever he should venture to show it. It is said by learned etymologists, that the name doll, for the images children play with, is derived from the word IDOL. From the number of dolls now made of him, he may be truly said, in that sense, to be i-doll-ized in this country.

Franklin’s humble “phiz” (his physiognomy, or face) masked his talent for self-promotion and subtle manipulation. This unlikely American idol wore his democratic credentials on his fur-trimmed sleeve. His diplomatic mission was successful; he obtained France’s financial and military support, which enabled America to win the Revolutionary War. Today, when we picture Benjamin Franklin, we tend to picture him as he looked during his residence in France.

Though his countrymen mistrusted Franklin for his Francophile and Anglophile sympathies, the French never forgot his friendship, or his face. When Franklin died in 1790, the French government declared three days of national mourning in his honor. And it was a French philosophe, A. R. J. Turgot, who best eulogized his friend Franklin, linking his early scientific accomplishments to his mature campaign for democracy: “He seized lightning from the skies and the scepter from tyrants.”

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is a Mellon Foundation Curatorial Fellow in French art at The Huntington.

Commemorating the 300th Anniversary of Franklin’s Birth

The three Huntington portraits of Benjamin Franklin will be displayed in the exhibition “The Art of Virtue: Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography,” on view from Dec. 17, 2005, to March 26, 2006, in the Library’s West Hall. The exhibition showcases one of the Huntington’s greatest treasures—the autograph manuscript of Franklin’s renowned autobiography.

In commemoration of Franklin’s 300th birthday in January 2006, historian Gordon S. Wood
will deliver the Allan Nevins Memorial Lecture, speaking on the “Americanization of Benjamin Franklin.” Wood is the Alva O. Way University Professor of History at Brown University and
a scholar of the early American republic. In 1997–98, he received the Fletcher Jones Distinguished Fellowship at The Huntington. The lecture will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2006, in Friends’ Hall.

The first page of Franklin’s autobiography, 1771–c.1790, Huntington Library.