Lost Portraits: William Darke
In 1858, Shenandoah Valley novelist, poet, and biographer John Esten Cooke published an essay on four of Virginia’s generals. “Memoirs of Generals Lee, Gates, Stephen and Darke” appeared anonymously in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Describing a tour local houses, Cooke noted that “within a radius of a mile or two” of Leetown, a village in what is now the eastern West Virginia panhandle, “lived long and weary years, Charles Lee, the sinister hero of Monmouth; Horatio Gates, loser of the battle of Camden, and the Southern campaign; Adam Stephen, the early friend of Washington;” and a fourth general named William Darke.
Darke finished his Revolutionary War service as a lieutenant colonel but was an important and active brigadier general in the Virginia militia in the 1790s. His most notable service at that rank was in federalized service suppressing the Whiskey Rebellion. Darke was admired locally, and the reputational deficits of the major generals brought Cooke’s estimation of the four men to an even level. It is remarkable that all four men lived so close to each other in what was Berkeley County until 1801.
William Darke's wooden home does not survive, but the stone building that housed enslaved workers does.
“The house of General Darke has no especial trait distinguishing it from other plain wooden farm-houses of the region,” Cooke reported, “and does not merit further description.” Instead, he wrote, “The most interesting remains of the soldier are perhaps three pictures which we recently saw in the house of one of his descendants. As two of these pictures are rare productions of art, and indicate, in no small degree, the idiosyncrasies of the worthy General, we shall notice them particularly.”
Darke’s portrait, Cooke related in his flowery style, “represents a man of fifty-five or sixty—hale, vigorous, and with that piercing glance indicating the leader of men—the inmate of camps. The lips are thin and full of determination and energy; the nose aquiline and strongly defined; the forehead broad, and furrowed with the anxieties and cares of a long military career. Thin scattered locks of dark hair roof, as it were, this countenance filled with vigor and determination. The shoulders are decorated with epaulets; and one hand is thrust into the breast, as in many of the pictures at the period when this was painted. The entire face, and air, and figure is that of a cool and determined man, who is not apt to hesitate when a fight or a foray is on the carpet, and whose greatest delight is experienced in the active and moving life of the frontier.”
This portrait of Darke, captain and major of the 8th Virginia Regiment, a three-year captive after Germantown, and a commander of militia (though a lieutenant colonel with a Continental commission) at Yorktown, is lost. Cooke went on to describe the two paintings he considered of greatest interest.
The next one depicted Darke “in a splendid uniform, standing, with his sword elevated and about to strike, above two figures lying upon the ground at his feet. The first is a Virginian, wearing the provincial uniform, who has fallen, covered with blood, beneath the hatchet of a huge savage; and prone upon the body of the fallen man, with his legs wrapped, as it were, around those of his victim, the Indian has his hands upon the scalp already half torn off, and hanging simply by a bloody remnant. But just at the critical moment the worthy General Darke has come to the rescue, the fatal sword descends upon the savage, and with his skull shattered, his face one mass of bloody foam, the Redface falls upon his victim, whose scalp he tears at, vindictively, even in death. The picture is painted with blood-thirsty vigor, if we may so speak; and there is no sort of doubt as to what it means.”
John Esten Cooke (1830-1886)
It is clear from early biographies that Darke hated the Natives he had spent many years at war with. His son was killed by the Miamis while under his command at the Battle of Wabash in 1791. Cooke’s language likewise shows no evidence of modern sensitivities. An old man who had been one of Darke’s slaves told Cooke, “It was painted, by Mr. Blinko when master was at home after the wars. I was a boy, and was bringing in wood for the fire. Master told him how to do it; he took his sword and raised it up, and looked mad like the picture—and Mr. Blinko painted him!” Who exactly “Mr. Blinko” was is a mystery. What happened to this painting is also not known.
Cooke then proceeded to describe the last painting: “This is a historical piece in which Mr. Blinko, the border artist, aimed to perpetuate on one canvas the leading triumphs of his patron. It is divided into six or eight compartments, separated by straight lines; and each of these divisions contains the form of one of General Darke’s adversaries falling before his brand. The first is a negro with a red coat, lying upon his back, with a bloody hole in his breast.” The elderly man told Cooke, “A boy that went over to the Britishers and master killed him.” In this instance “boy” is not a reference to the Loyalist’s youth. Indeed, Darke’s first service with the 8th Virginia was responding to the Dunmore Proclamation, in which the royal governor promised freedom to male slaves and indentured servants who rallied to the King’s standard.
The lost paintings of William Darke were viewed by John Esten Cooke at Piedmont, a home in Charles Town, W.Va. The main portion of the house was built by John Briscoe in 1785 as an addition to the small white structure, built by Robert Worthington in 1735.
“The other divisions, with the exception of one or two at the bottom of the canvas, display British officers in red jackets and buff short clothes, falling backward, forward, sideways, but all agreeing in one particular. From one and all rushes a small river of intensely crimson blood, gushing out like water from a pump, and dyeing the earth for yards. The last compartments contain Indians in the same condition, after coming in collision with General Darke—and the genius of the artist may be generally summed up in the words, “Blood, and plenty of it!” The last panel, too, accurately reflects the timeline of Darke’s career. His final combat engagement was at Arthur St. Clair’s loss to the Miamis on the Wabash. It was Darke who led the final charge that allowed a fraction of the federal troops to escape.
“The expenditure of crimson upon these pictures would serve to color a thousand portraits, Cooke reiterated. “There is something ferocious and barbaric in the gusto with which the work seems executed. The artist revels in slaughter, and his canvas breathes a spirit of blood and death. Perhaps no more curious relics of border times exist any where than these half terrible, half ludicrous scenes on the old cracked canvas, telling the horrible story of the past.” This painting, too, is lost.
Cooke, who in three years would wear a Confederate uniform, wondered in a long paragraph at Darke’s motives for commissioning the multi-panel work. “But let us not criticize too strongly the good General’s mode of amusing himself … or censure Mr. Blinko, painter of historical pieces, for his inclination toward blood. To hate a savage was considered at that period a commendable thing; and the bloody massacres which had made the fathers and mothers and children of the valley wail in their great agony, had left but little pity in the hearts of the borderers for the lurking foe.”
The surviving portrait of William Darke portrays him as a lieutenant colonel of federal troops sent by President Washington under Maj. Gen. Arthur St. Clair in 1791 to counter Indians in the Northwest Territory. It was painted by Frederick Kemmelmeyer who may be "Mr. Blinko." (MESDA)
So, who was “Mr. Blinko?” There appears to be no evidence of him except one nineteenth-century source cited in a 1940 Jefferson County Historical Society list of local artists. This may be a circular reference to Cooke’s essay, but its phrasing may nevertheless hold a clue. Blinko is described as “a local artist, who painted the famous portrait of General William Darke, in military dress and with upraised sword, and several other portraits, owned by the Briscoe family.” None of the paintings described by Cooke seems to have survived long enough to be included in a 1913 description of portraits in the Briscoe family’s possession. The “famous” one, however, is evidently a portrait attributed to Frederick Kemmelmeyer now in the possession of the Museum of Southern Decorative Arts in North Carolina. It shows none of the sanguine properties described by Cooke in 1858. Perhaps “Blinko” was a nickname for Kemmelmeyer. Perhaps not. And perhaps we’ll see Mr. Blinko’s other paintings of William Darke again, but that seems very unlikely.
