Horace Rockwell: the first professional painter

1836 - c. 1850

The arrival: Every Fort Wayne art story starts with an itinerant. Horace Rockwell was the first known traveling artist to visit the town and make a living in it, and the History Center's judgment is plainer than that: he settled in Fort Wayne in 1836 and is considered the city's first professional painter. He claimed a New York birth, on 7 July 1808 by his own account, and the record of his early years is thin in the way of men who carried their trade in a box: reports of the day called him "of Philadelphia," and a portrait by him stands in a Philadelphia exhibition catalogue of 1835, a year before the move west.

The work: What he sold was likeness, and the buyers were the families who were turning a fort and a canal town into a city. In 1843 Samuel Hanna commissioned the portrait that carries Rockwell's name down: the Hanna family at slightly over five feet square, oil on canvas, now in the Fort Wayne Museum of Art's collection, painted, in the History Center's reading, naturally and without idealization, the faces given the skill and the rest given less. About 1840 he painted Jesse Vermilyea, Aboite Township's first postmaster and canal innkeeper, and his wife Maria; those portraits survive in the Historical Society's own collection. A religious canvas, "Rebekah at the Well," is now held by the Roanoke Heritage Center. A half dozen more of his images are reproduced in the Allen County history of 2005.

The trace: Then the paper trail does what it does with itinerants. In the census of 1850 he is living in Fort Wayne under a mangled name, Cirael or Carael Rockwell, age 43, born in New York. No source found fixes when or where he died, and the leg prints that gap rather than closing it: the city's first professional painter has a documented arrival and no documented end.

Sources:

1. History Center, Allen County Fort Wayne Historical Society, virtual exhibit record for the Vermilyea portraits (2001.1.1) (settled 1836; first professional painter; the portraits of about 1840).
2. History Center Notes and Queries, Tom Castaldi, "Horace Rockwell: Artist" (Fort Wayne Monthly, March 2009) (the 1843 Hanna commission and its size; the New York birth claim and the 1835 Philadelphia catalogue; "Rebekah at the Well"; the 1850 census entry).