The Poet, the Painter, and the Bishop's Wife: Chaucer on the Prairie

Abstract

Abstract In painting the library portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer currently owned by St. Olaf College (Northfield, Minnesota), the nineteenth-century Boston artist Thomas Truman Spear worked from engravings based on the Harleian Hoccleve portrait published in mid- to late-nineteenth-century editions of Chaucer's works. Spear's portrait likely traveled to the Midwest in the possession of Evangeline Marrs Simpson Whipple, a wealthy Boston widow and then second wife of the historically important Episcopal Bishop Henry Whipple of Minnesota. By including the Chaucer portrait in the interior design of their home, Evangeline Whipple emphasized cultural ties between the fledgling Anglican Church on the frontier and the Mother Church in Canterbury. This case study in American medievalism reveals the story of a female patron of the arts, her quest to bring Chaucer's Anglicizing influence to the Midwest, and her savvy use of the poet's reputation to promote her and her husband's religious projects.