21 Facts About Jeremiah Theus

Jeremiah Theus was a Swiss-born American painter, primarily of portraits.

Jeremiah Theus was active mainly around Charleston, South Carolina, in which city he remained almost without competition for the bulk of his career.

Jeremiah Theus was born in the city of Chur, in the Swiss canton of Graubunden, the eldest child of Simeon and Anna Walser Theus.

Jeremiah Theus was nineteen when he immigrated with his family to the Province of South Carolina, whose General Assembly had provided land grants and transport funds to encourage European Protestants to settle in the colony.

Simeon Theus was given 250 acres of land along the Edisto River in what was then Orangeburgh Township, today Orangeburg County.

Jeremiah Theus established his studio in a central location, the northeast corner of Broad and Meeting Streets.

Jeremiah Theus was twenty-eight in 1744, yet he already felt confident enough in his abilities to open an evening drawing school in his home.

Jeremiah Theus took on a variety of commissions during his early career, including painting and guilding the steeple of St Michael's Episcopal Church in 1756, a job for which the congregation's commissioners paid him 77 pounds and 10 shillings for his labor and supplies.

Jeremiah Theus painted the weather vane, and contributed 50 pounds towards the building fund for a new structure; he later owned a pew in the church.

Jeremiah Theus was able to build a highly successful practice for himself in the three decades he spent in Charleston; this was due largely to the fact that for much of that time he was the only painter in town with any significant reputation.

Jeremiah Theus died in Charleston in 1774; his death was noted in at least three local papers, including The South-Carolina and American General Gazette and the South Carolina Gazette, both of which referred to him in their obituary notices as both "ingenious" and "honest".

The will reveals how successful Jeremiah Theus was in his chosen profession; besides holding nearly 3,000 pounds in cash, he owned a house in Charleston, 200 acres of land in Orangeburg County, a town lot in Orangeburgh, and seven slaves.

Jeremiah Theus had, before his death, given 2,100 pounds to the children of his first marriage.

Jeremiah Theus typically confined himself to uncomplicated compositions, and the bulk of his portraits are bust-length works, approximately thirty by twenty-five inches at their largest; like many portraitists of the era, he produced miniatures.

Jeremiah Theus frequently borrowed from English prints for his smaller works as well, and at least one historian has noted that many of his female sitters share identical poses and elements of costume, down to the folds and shadows in their dresses; each work is individualized with minor changes to various details.

Male sitters in Jeremiah Theus portraits were typically offered a handful of poses to choose from, including the then-popular hand-in-waistcoat gesture; sometimes the artist would include a hat, tucked under the sitter's arm, to provide variety.

In other portraits, Jeremiah Theus preferred the shorter bust-length portrait type; in either case, the format chosen allowed him to avoid having to paint the subject's hands.

Besides creating original work, Jeremiah Theus sometimes served as a copyist for his clients, although few of his surviving works have been demonstrated to be copies.

Two nearly identical portraits of a man, possibly Isaac Smith, are known to be by Jeremiah Theus; they appear to be copies of a lost original.

Jeremiah Theus did not confine himself to portraiture when it came to his art.

Today paintings by Jeremiah Theus can be found in a number of American museum collections, including Brooklyn Museum of Art, Worcester Art Museum, Gibbes Museum of Art, Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, Charleston Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.