Marty,

By "signs of drink," do you mean the signs that hung outside taverns?  It
seems likely that American tavernkeepers would copy available images if
they ran a business named for a memorable worthy.  But it doesn't seem
likely that they would hang the actual portrait outside--materials such as
canvas wouldn't endure too many New England winters.  Even if painted on
heavy wood, outdoor tavern signs would need regular retouching, I would
think.  Thus their reputation for bearing an indistinct or mutable image.

Regular maintenance might lead to a succession of portraits.  I'm sure
you recall the King George/George Washington sign in "Rip Van Winkle."  In
1828 Neal Dow noted (in a letter to a fellow Adams campaigner) that in
Portland all the tavern signs bearing portraits now bore the image of
Andrew Jackson (The Reminiscences of Neal Dow:  Recollections of Eighty
Years. Portland, Maine: Evening Express, 1898, p. 131).  On the other
hand, neglected portraits could bear a desirable weathered patina--off-hand
I'm thinking of the sign of the "Blue Dragon" that Dickens celebrates in
chapter 3 of Martin Chuzzlewit.

American tavernkeepers would certainly hang portraits of Puritan ancestors
in their taverns, if they had them, to dignify the scene or perhaps to
remind customers that the tavernkeeper's ancestors figured in the
Revolution.  Bar-rooms are hell on paintings, of course, so even inside
these portraits would lose detail and represent the Puritan past only
vaguely.  Hawthorne used such a Puritan bar-room as the setting for the
"Legends of the Province-House" first published in the Democratic Review.
As he writes in "Edward Randolph's Portrait" (DR June 1838): "In one of
the apartments of the Province-House there was long preserved an ancient
picture, the frame of which was as black as ebony, and the canvass itself
so dark with age, damp, and smoke, that not a touch of the painter's art
could be discerned.  Time had thrown an impenetrable veil over it, and
left to tradition, and fable, and conjecture, to say what had once been
there portrayed.  During the rule of many successive governors, it had
hung, by prescriptive and undisputed right, over the mantel-piece of the
same chamber."

Maybe you are thinking of Hawthorne's representation of Puritan portraits
in taverns?  Otherwise I can't think of another discussion of Puritan
portraiture in taverns or on their outside signs.  Maybe another on the
list can help.

Jon

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Jon Stephen Miller
Managing Editor
Walt Whitman Quarterly Review
Department of English
The University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa  52242-1492
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