Lots of Lott: Examining Portraits of John A. Lott

The Center for Brooklyn History is home to a wide variety of portraits of Brooklyn residents. The walls of the Othmer Library include a handful of our portrait paintings—serious-looking oil on canvas images of wealthy 19th-century men and women dressed to impress.

Though most of these paintings were donated in the years between the founding of the Long Island Historical Society in 1863 to the early decades of the 20th century, the staff at CBH can usually give a definitive answer when a visitor asks us “who are these people?” Thanks to the inventories, donation papers, and curatorial research preserved by my collections management predecessors, I’m not starting from scratch whenever I need to look into an artwork or artifact in our holdings.  

However, there are still mysteries that crop up.  

Enter the imposing Portrait of John A. Lott, 1806-1878, painted by Thomas Martin Jensen (1831-1916) in 1880. The Lott name might sound familiar to some of you; there is Lott Street in Flatbush, and the historic Henderick I. Lott House is one of the few remaining Dutch Colonial farmhouses in Kings County. The Lott family’s presence in Brooklyn extends back to 1652, when brothers Pieter and Bartel Lott emigrated from the Netherlands and settled in the town of Flatbush in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. The family acquired large tracts of land in what would become Brooklyn, accumulating wealth in part through the exploitation of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Several of Pieter Lott's descendants were prominent citizens of Kings County who held influential positions in public office at the local and state levels.

John A. Lott was no exception: after studying law, he would join Henry Cruse Murphy and John Vanderbilt to form the influential law firm Lott, Murphy & Vanderbilt. In 1838, Lott was appointed First Judge of the Kings County Court of Common Pleas, and in 1842 he was elected as a state senator. In 1857 he was elected Supreme Court Justice of the State of New York. Lott’s resume doesn’t end there: he was elected to the Associate Court of Appeals in 1869 and elected Chief Commissioner for the Commission on Appeals from 1870 to 1875. He also served as president of the Flatbush, Coney Island, Park and Concourse Railroad Company.  

All this to say that Judge John A. Lott was considered one of the most notable citizens of Brooklyn in the mid to late 19th century. But if Lott’s life was so well documented, what more was there to uncover about this roughly 5-foot-tall portrait?

In preparation for interpreting the portrait for an upcoming exhibition, our Chief Historian was researching John A. Lott’s biographical details. She found a webpage dedicated to Lott created by the Historical Society of New York Courts which included our portrait!  

Or did it? The image of the painting was low-resolution and tightly cropped, but it also didn’t seem quite right. Of course, the orientation of the image was flipped, but that could be due to scanning a transparency or slide photograph.  

Turns out there is another copy of the Lott portrait at the New York Court of Appeals Hall in Albany. The courtroom and its anteroom are lined with portraits of former Judges of the Court of Appeals, Chief Judges of the New York Court of Chancery and Chief Justices of the New York Supreme Court. A brochure of the 2004 renovation of the Court of Appeals Hall includes an inventory of the collection and lists an 1880 Thomas Jensen painting of John A. Lott (portrait #66) on the South Wall of the Courtroom.  

This raised more questions about the Lott portrait: Which portrait was painted first? How did they end up at the Brooklyn Historical Society and Court of Appeals?

The provenance of the portrait at CBH was straightforward; the donation papers stated it was donated to the Long Island Historical Society in 1962 by Mrs. Russell Vernon Cruikshank (born Anita Livingston Lott in 1888). Anita was the granddaughter of John A. Lott, through her father Jeramiah Lott (born 1844). The portrait had been in her family for as long as could be remembered, but the donation correspondence didn’t mention anything about a second copy in Albany.

A search of the digitized newspapers in Brooklyn Newsstand both answered my original questions about the portraits and deepened the mystery. The CBH Lott portrait is explicitly mentioned as being painted by Thomas Jensen for John A. Lott’s wife Catharine Lott in a November 19, 1880, issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The article states ("Art Notes," November 19, 1880, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, page 2): "Thomas Jensen is at work on a second portrait of the late Judge Lott, intended for the wife of the deceased." The word “second” indicates that the Court of Appeals painting was painted first.

More articles covering Jensen’s portrait paintings in Brooklyn Newsstand were returned by the search. The Court of Appeals portrait was presented by Lott’s law partner Henry Cruse Murphy and associate Winchester Britton in 1881. The painting was ("Presentation of the Portrait of Late Judge Lott", March 15, 1881, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, page 2): “...intended to be hung in the Court of Appeals chamber...” where it remains to this day.

What made me raise my eyebrows was an article about Thomas Jensen from 1873 that stated ("Th. Jensen", May 8, 1873, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, page 2): "...the principal work which engages his attention at present is a portrait of Judge Lott... [Jensen] will begin the picture in oil as soon as circumstances and his sitter’s convenience will allow.” This would mean there was a third portrait of Lott by Jensen, dating back to 1873!

By coincidence, our Chief Historian ran into a familiar face at Borough Hall not long after this bout of research. After reaching out to the NYC Public Design Commission, which is responsible for the care of city-owned art, their Senior Archivist confirmed the identity of the 1873 portrait of John A. Lott by Jensen. This original portrait, painted by Jensen when Lott was still alive, is included in a 1909 Catalogue of the works of art belonging to the city of New York. The catalog says that the portrait was given to “the Court” (or Kings County Court House) in 1873.

My final takeaway from researching the portraits of John A. Lott is that caring for the documentation of an artifact can be just as crucial as caring for the physical object. Without the work of preserving and digitizing the 19th century Brooklyn newspapers; without the work of the archivists at the NYC Public Design Commission; and without the record keeping of my predecessors here at CBH, I might never have been able to find our portrait’s related artworks.

But there is always a chance that we still haven’t found every copy of John A. Lott by Thomas Jensen. If anyone knows of a fourth painting, please let us know in the comments.

Other References:

The Art Commission of the City of New York. Catalogue of the works of art belonging to the city of New York v.1, (New York, N.Y.: The Gilliss press, 1909) N601.N5X (Internet). Smithsonian Libraries.

Gallati, Barbara Dayer. Borough Hall portrait collection, (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Fund for the Borough of Brooklyn, 1992), ND1311.9.B7. Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.

State of New York Court of Appeals. "Court of Appeals of the State of New York: Restoration and Renovation 1842-2004", (Albany, N.Y., New York Courts, January 01, 2004) Accessed November 16, 2024. https://www.nycourts.gov/ctapps/news/1230LB.pdf.

Stiles, Henry Reed. The civil, political, professional and ecclesiastical history, and commercial and industrial record of the County of Kings and the City of Brooklyn, N. Y. from 1683 to 1884, (New York, N.Y.: W.W. Munsell & Co., 1884) Brooklyn Public Library, Center for Brooklyn History.