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"Old Pat," The Independent Beggar
Samuel Lovett Waldo (American, 1783–1861)
c. 1819
- Medium
- oil on wood
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Framed: 68 x 57 x 7 cm (26 3/4 x 22 7/16 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 47.8 x 36.9 cm (18 13/16 x 14 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- United States
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, American Painting and Sculpture
- Credit line
- Gift of J. H. Wade
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
With this study of a disheveled person—perhaps a man named Patrick MacGregor—the popular society portraitist Samuel Waldo challenged assumptions that successful New Yorkers may have made about their city's prosperity. Waldo sold many copies of an engraving portraying "Old Pat" and made a finished portrait of him called The Beggar's Dessert that included a meager bone and bowl as attributes. In this painting, the sitter's gaunt, careworn features suggest considering him in sympathetic terms, yet his forceful gaze presents him as someone who cannot easily be made into an object of pity.
