Benjamin Franklin: A Connection to My Dad

This portrait has some personal meaning for me. It depicts the likeness of Benjamin Franklin—printer, writer, inventor, entrepreneur, natural philosopher, politician and statesman. Oddly, I don’t know very much about Benjamin Franklin, other than what I have learned from osmosis.

My father, J. A. Leo Lemay, was arguably the foremost scholar of Benjamin Franklin. What I do know, after a lifetime of seeing book titles like The Letters of Silence Dogood and fifty-three copies of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (yes, you read that right… fifty-three!) is that Benjamin Franklin was a prolific writer, full of humor, and he was constantly solving problems.

When he was elderly and infirm, he had trouble reaching books that were located high on his bookshelves. In that situation, most people would just ask someone to get the book for them. Not Franklin. He invented a chair with a built in step-ladder so that he could hoist himself up to get his own dang book, thank you very much.

Speaking of bookshelves . . . my Dad’s shelves, in addition to all the volumes of The Autobiography, had the normal stuff on them. You know, a Ben Franklin action figure; a coffee mug with Ben Franklin’s face on it; two bookends featuring bronze Ben Franklin figures sitting on a chair.

In other words, while growing up, Ben Franklin’s face greeted me whenever I’d pass through my dad’s study on my way to the kitchen to get a snack. Art has an uncanny way of functioning as a kind of time capsule for personal memory.

The portrait of Benjamin Franklin always makes me think of my dad with pleasure, as my father died in 2008. I wonder which portraits in our collection remind our readers of someone, or something, from their own lives? Oh, and if you go to see the Benjamin Franklin portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, keep an eye out for me—I’ll be the viewer with a smile on my face.

-- Kate C. Lemay, Historian, National Portrait Gallery