Portrait of Thomas Paine by Laurent Dabos

In this blog article, National Portrait Gallery historian Margaret Christman discusses the story behind Thomas Paine’s circa 1792 portrait by French artist Laurent Dabos. This recently acquired portrait is featured in the new exhibition “One Life: Thomas Paine, the Radical Founding Father” on the museum’s first floor.

Thomas Paine (1737–1809), whose stirring words in Common Sense (1776) had paved the way for the Declaration of Independence, was not averse to posing for posterity. Yet, as fate would have it, a number of his portraits have dropped from sight. Discoveries of important images have been made, however, and the National Portrait Gallery has recently acquired one of them.

The story begins with Paine’s biographer, Moncure Daniel Conway, who in the 1880s began an exhaustive investigation in Europe and America of all things Paine. In his two-volume Life of Thomas Paine (1892), Conway revealed the existence of twelve full-length oil likenesses of leaders of the French Revolution— Paine the only non-Frenchman among them. These had been undertaken around 1791 and 1792 and reproduced, Conway stated, “in cheap woodcuts and distributed about France.” The dozen originals were in the possession of a wealthy Syracuse, New York, businessman.

In 1908, Conway—noting that the artist was Laurent Dabos of Toulouse—indicated that the painting of Thomas Paine had come into the hands of the widow of a British collector. (This is the small full-length acquired by the British National Portrait Gallery in 2006.)  Conway, however, was not aware that Dabos had also painted a bust version derived from the same picture. After turning up some years ago at a house sale in Northumberland, this beguiling image of America’s most radical Founding Father was brought to the attention of the National Portrait Gallery and purchased in the spring of 2008.

Dabos has captured Paine at a point of high drama. In 1787 he had returned temporarily to his native England from America in an effort to bring his design for an iron bridge to fruition. The 1789 storming of the Bastille in Paris rekindled Paine’s passion for “political Bridges,” and conservative Gouverneur Morris found him to be “inflated to the Eyes and big with a Litter of Revolution.”

Rebutting British conservative Whig politician Edmund Burke’s denunciation of the French Revolution, Paine, in his two-part Rights of Man, hammered away at monarchy and the established order of the English constitution. Charged by the British with “wicked and seditious writings” in 1792, he fled to France where he was greeted with cannon salutes.

Elected to sit in the National Convention, he took his seat on September 21, 1792, eager—although he spoke no French—to help write a new constitution for a republic rooted in freedom and equality.

The beginning was an echo of Common Sense: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But soon enough, Paine found himself on the wrong side of power. Spurning Paine’s advice to spare the life of Louis XVI and exile him to America, the Convention sent the king to the guillotine on January 21, 1793.

Before the year was out, the somewhat moderate Girondins, with whom Paine was allied, were overthrown by the Jacobins. One after another of the twelve luminaries whom Dabos had portrayed dropped off the stage—the Marquis de Lafayette imprisoned in Austria; Marat stabbed in his bath; others beheaded.

Paine was arrested on December 27, 1793, and, despite his claim as an American citizen, was confined to Luxembourg Palace prison on the basis of his birth in a country that was now at war with France. “I saw myself in continual danger,” Paine wrote years later to Samuel Adams. “My friends were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off, and . . . I every day expected the same fate.”

When Paine emerged from his more than ten months’ imprisonment—after the fall of Maximilien Robespierre (another of Dabos’s subjects) and through the efforts of the new American minister, James Monroe—he was the only one of the “Dabos twelve” still alive on French soil.

Read more about the exhibition "One Life: Thomas Paine, the Radical Founding Father” in this article from Smithsonian's Around the Mall blog.