Lieutenant John Trumbull Ray

Thomas Seir Cummings, born Bath, England 1804-died Hackensack, NJ 1894 · ca. 1830

John Trumbull Ray was the illegitimate son of Captain John Trumbull, one of colonial America’s leading portrait painters. Following the death of his first love, Trumbull had an affair with one of his brother’s servants, a woman named Temperance Ray. She bore a son in 1792 who strongly resembled Trumbull. Trumbull provided money for the boy’s upbringing, passing him off as his “nephew.” Against his father’s wishes, Ray enlisted in the British army in 1812, and served in the Peninsular War under Wellington. In 1814 he was made lieutenant, and arranged to have Andrew Robertson, a leading Scottish miniaturist, paint his portrait. Thomas Seir Cummings made two copies of that miniature, one of which is on display here.