LHM Portrait at Union College

Courtesy of the Union College Permanent Collection.

In 1945, four prominent citizens of Rochester, including Rochester Museum Director Arthur C. Parker, commissioned a portrait of Lewis Henry Morgan.  Mrs. Minnie R. Wyman, a member of the art staff at Rochester Institute of Technology, painted the portrait from an engraving made a few years before Morgan’s death in 1881.  The portrait was given to Union College, Morgan’s alma mater, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary in honor of the man whom Parker and his colleagues regarded as “the greatest intellect ever developed” in the city of Rochester (Times-Union, 23 May 1945).

Arthur Parker, the great-nephew of Morgan’s collaborator, Tonawanda Seneca chief and Union Civil War general Ely S. Parker, was an admirer of Lewis Henry Morgan’s scholarship.  He worked actively and publicly to keep the memory of Morgan’s life and work alive in Rochester.  Parker spoke along with anthropologist Leslie A. White, another admirer of Morgan, and sociologist Bernhard J. Stern at Union College during a symposium when the painting was unveiled. Plans are currently underway for the return of Morgan’s portrait to Rochester as part of an exhibition at the University of Rochester to mark the bicentennial of Morgan’s birth in Fall 2018.