3pp.+ original mailing envelope.

John Skirving writes to Jordan L[awrence] Mott in New York: “Whilst in Washington, I saw [Samuel] Colt riding in a Carriage…It will be no use trying to get him, as sit he will not. I have been in town 3 times to see [R.?] Cornelious, he has moved to his country seat some 8 miles from Phila. and at the Factory they say it is very uncertain when he will be in town… Mr. McCormick seems determined that we shall not fail in his portrait for I received another [telegram] last night and I think the operators in Chicago beat the rest in the Union or elsewhere…your Cousins the  Japanese in Washington desire to be remembered. I…visited them thrice, so much for friends at Court. Brady told me he was then two weeks before he could get at them…Mr. Schussele is driving along and today the Carpenters are taking off the roof of the house and in two weeks are to have a room 16 feet high by the whole size of the house completed ready for use - to have a large Skylight and all that will be required to make a first rate Studio. He is determined to make the picture a good one but never can do it in the small room he now paints in…” An important letter about the making of the first classic work of art to pay tribute to American invention and technology. In 1859, Skirving, a Philadelphia architect and engineer, well-known in Washington for designing the heating and ventilation systems of major government buildings, convinced his friend Jordan Mott, New York industrialist and inventor of the anthracite burning stove, to underwrite artist Christian Schussele’s painting of a 6 foot by 4 foot group portrait of the nation’s best-known living inventors. The painting, titled “Men of Progress”, would show Mott himself, Samuel Morse, Samuel Colt, Cyrus McCormick, Charles Goodyear and 14 others who had “altered the course of contemporary civilization”, gathered together beneath a portrait of Benjamin Franklin. The assembly would, of course, be fictional; each of the rich prima donnas would have to be convinced – by the persuasive Skirving – to visit Schussele’s Philadelphia studio for individual sittings. Skirving hoped the finished work would be “one of the most valuable historical paintings ever executed”, inspiring young engineers and scientists to follow in the footsteps of these heroic technological trail-blazers. This letter, naming Colt, McCormick and Schussele, is a significant account of the making of the portrait, particularly intriguing as it also mentions Robert Cornelius, owner of a large lighting factory in Philadelphia, who was also a chemist and American photographic pioneer, his 1839 daguerreotype self-portrait being one of the first photographs of a human ever produced. Though Cornelius does not appear in “Men of Progress”, this letter implies that he was on Skirving’s original list for inclusion – possibly because of his youthful work in photography; this was undoubtedly a field of interest for Skirving, who also here mentions Matthew Brady’s photographic portrait, later that year, of the first Japanese ambassadors to the United States.  Historians now hail Men of Progress as a turning point in American art, aesthetically honoring scientific innovation and helping idolize technology in popular culture. (Copied as an engraving by John Sartain, it would later be mass-distributed by “Scientific American”). The painting, which Schussele completed for Mott the following year, with a smaller copy for Skirving, long graced a wall of the White House; it is now held by the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery.