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 -------------------------------------- Jon Stephen Miller Managing Editor Walt Whitman Quarterly Review Department of English The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa 52242-1492 [log in to unmask] (319) 335-0592 ======================================