Augustine Clement
Augustine Clement settled in Dorchester when he arrived on the ship James in 1635. He was the most likely person to have painted three portraits: Doctor John Clarke, Governor John Endecott, and minister Richard Mather.
Gold, Sidney M. “A Study in Early boston Portrait Attributions: Augusttine Clement, Painter-Stainer of Reading, Berkshire, and Massachusetts Bay.” Old-Time New England, lviii (3), January-March, 1968, 61-78.
No. 22577 Richard Mather, portrait at American Antiquarian Society
The Mather portrait has also been attributed to John Foster of Dorchester, who produced a print of Mather owned by the American Antiquarian Society.
http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=linda50&id=I11181
Came from Reading, Berkshire, England
Migration: 1635 on the James from Southampton
First residence: Dorchester, removed to Boston 1652; back in Dorchester 1668
Freeman: May 26, 1636
Augustine Clement (about 1600-1674) is one such artist who trained in England and emigrated to New England, though no works can be assigned to him with certainty. Clement was born near Reading, Berkshire, England, and apprenticed to the decorative and heraldic painters Jonathan Miller and Edward Newman. Clement emigrated to Massachusetts in 1635, settling in Dorchester and then Boston. While Clement was in Boston in time to paint most of the paintings attributed to the Freake Painter, he could not have painted Elizabeth Clarke Freake (Mrs. John Freake) and Baby Mary. An inscription on that portrait gives the age of Mary as six months. Since she was born May 6, 1674, the painting was probably completed in November or early December 1674. Clement died October 1, 1674.16 His son, however, was also an artist. Samuel Clement (about 1635?1678) is identified in contemporary documents as a painter and a “painter-stainer,” and his probate inventory listed “colouring Stuffe for painting” worth five pounds among his possessions. Though Samuel Clement lived in the North End of Boston near the Freakes and other sitters thought to have been painted by the same hand, the case for him as the Freake Painter remains circumstantial and speculative since there were about fourteen artists working in Boston in the seventeenth century.
No. 16511 Doctor John Clarke, possibly by Augustine Clement
The earliest dated work (1664) is an unsigned portrait made in Boston of Elizabeth Eggington, which is owned by the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford. This portrait represents a young girl in elaborate clothing, holding a feather fan and wearing a miniature image of a gentleman (probably her father). Unfortunately, this painting has sustained considerable damage or wear over the years. In somewhat better shape is a painting which also bears the date 1664 depicting a bearded physician holding a skull and an instrument known as a trephine (for cutting a hole in the skull of a patient). This painting is also unsigned, but it has been attributed to the hand of the immigrant Augustine Clement who trained in England. In the new world he was a neighbor of the physician depicted in the painting, Dr. John Clarke. The painting of the surgeon, Dr. Clarke, now hangs in The Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine; Harvard’s Boston Medical Library.
By 1670 a different hand seems to be at work painting portraits in Boston. This person may have been Augustine Clement’s son, Samuel Clement, Jr. The paintings which cluster around the date 1670 include the following works:
Mr. John Freake, Mrs. John Freake and her baby Mary (Worcester Museum of Art)
Margaret Gibbs, Robert Gibbs (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
Henry Gibbs (Sunrise Museum, Inc., Charleston, West Va.)
The Mason Children (M.H. DeYoung Memorial Museum, San Francisco, Cal.)