“Hamilton” is the biggest thing on Broadway, and at 7 feet 9 inches high, the portrait of Alexander Hamilton is one of the biggest things in City Hall. It is 15 inches taller than Bill de Blasio, the tallest New York mayor in modern history.
But it is a tiny image of Hamilton that has drawn the attention of a British scholar who insists City Hall somehow managed to lose the 19th-century painting on which it was based. How and when the painting was lost — if it ever was — is unclear.
What piqued the scholar’s interest was the image of Hamilton drawn for a 3-cent postage stamp that the United States Post Office Department issued in 1957. It carried the words “Alexander Hamilton Bicentennial” and the dates 1757 and 1957, although many recent historians — among them Ron Chernow, whose best seller inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical — prefer 1755 for Hamilton’s birth year.
The scholar, Charles Posner, maintains that the designer at the federal Bureau of Engraving and Printing relied on a photograph of a painting by John Weimar, a forgotten artist from the mid-19th century. Mr. Posner, an emeritus professor at the University of London’s Institute of Education who has been commissioned by the American Philatelic Society to write a series of books on United States commemorative stamps, found a number of mentions of the Weimar painting that said it was at City Hall.
But the painting is nowhere to be found, according to officials of the city’s Public Design Commission, which oversees the art collection at City Hall.
They even wonder if it ever actually was at City Hall.
And, to make this little mystery all the more confusing, the portrait on the stamp was reversed from both Weimar’s Hamilton and John Trumbull’s Hamilton, the tall portrait that now hangs in the Blue Room at City Hall.
Mary Beth Betts, who coordinates City Hall tours for the design commission and is a former director of research for the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, said the Weimar credit was probably a misattribution. She suggested that Weimar might have been responsible for “probably one of the many copies” of the Trumbull painting.
“It seems like it was misattributed to Weimar in the 1890s somehow,” Ms. Betts said. “We have the catalog of the works from 1909, and the only portrait they list is by Trumbull. Could there have been a portrait based on Trumbull by Weimar in the 19th century? It’s possible. That’s the mystery. But the painting we have is the Trumbull.”
Ms. Betts said she had checked what historians refer to as “Stokes,” I. N. Phelps Stokes’s “The Iconography of Manhattan Island, 1498-1909.” It is considered by many historians to be the single most important work about the city, at least until 1909.
“He was pretty comprehensive,” she said. “You’d think he’d have mentioned it if he came up with it.”
But Mr. Posner said he did not believe that there was no Weimar, even though he acknowledged that there was no official record of it and that it was not great art. “To put it mildly,” he said in an email, “the quality is not of the first order.” Later, by telephone from London, he added, “I think my dogs could paint a better painting.”
But based on references he found, Mr. Posner concluded that between 1858 and at least 1902, the Weimar painting was on display at City Hall, as was the Trumbull.
“One can only conclude that the Weimar painting has been lost, stolen or destroyed,” he said.
Ms. Betts countered with evidence from Charles Henry Hart, a lawyer from Philadelphia who doubled as an art historian as the 19th century waned and the 20th dawned. He credited the painting to Trumbull and said that it “in some unaccountable way had the name of ‘Weimar’ frequently attached to it as the painter.”
Ms. Betts also cited an article in Scribner’s magazine in 1909 that echoed Mr. Hart, referring to “curious misnamings” in attributing the image to Weimar.
“I am not convinced,” Mr. Posner said. “Neither Hart nor Scribner’s presents any evidence at all.”
Mr. Posner said that the Weimar painting was mentioned in an 1849 inventory of paintings in City Hall. He also said that the official “Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York” for 1868 noted that four paintings had been moved from the Board of Aldermen’s chamber to the Governor’s Room, among them Weimar’s Hamilton. (As it happens, Ms. Betts is the author of a history of the Governor’s Room.)
The portrait of Hamilton in an 1879 biography of the founding father by the jurist George Shea was attributed to Weimar. So was the image of Hamilton published, in color, with an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1884. The caption said, “From the portrait by Weimar, in the Governor’s Room, New York City Hall.”
Weimar was also credited in “A History of the American People” by Woodrow Wilson, published in 1902, the year Wilson was installed as president of Princeton University, 10 years before he got a different presidential job. “Notes on Illustrations” for Volume 3 contains the same wording about the Hamilton portrait as Harper’s.
“It is certainly possible that Weimar also copied from Trumbull,” Mr. Posner wrote. “His painting is certainly similar to the Trumbull portrait, but aside from being inferior in quality, there are some differences.”
Ms. Betts said the record on the Trumbull was clear. “We have the minutes of the Common Council when they commissioned Trumbull to do it,” she said. If there are similar mentions of Weimar, they have escaped her attention, and the proceedings of the Board of Aldermen are not indexed. “You’d have to go through them page by page to see if there’s any reference to Weimar,” she said.
As for what might have happened to the Weimar painting, the Governor’s Room was renovated in 1904. The project took four years to complete.
“If the painting did exist and was there, I wonder if during the refurbishment, it didn’t go, as we say here, walkies,” Mr. Posner said. “It is possible that much material was lost or jettisoned. The best I can say is, more research is required so we can get to the bottom of this.”
