"Old Pat," The Independent Beggar (c. 1819): Art, History and Details

"Old Pat," The Independent Beggar (c. 1819) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Samuel Lovett Waldo (American, 1783–1861).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

With this study of a disheveled person—perhaps a man named Patrick MacGregor—the popular society portraitist Samuel Waldo challenged assumptions that successful New Yorkers may have made about their city's prosperity. Waldo sold many copies of an engraving portraying "Old Pat" and made a finished portrait of him called The Beggar's Dessert that included a meager bone and bowl as attributes. In this painting, the sitter's gaunt, careworn features suggest considering him in sympathetic terms, yet his forceful gaze presents him as someone who cannot easily be made into an object of pity.

Object facts

• Title: "Old Pat," The Independent Beggar
• Date: c. 1819
• Creator attribution: Samuel Lovett Waldo (American, 1783–1861)
• Culture: America
• Type: Painting
• Technique: oil on wood
• Dimensions: Framed: 68 x 57 x 7 cm (26 3/4 x 22 7/16 x 2 3/4 in.); Unframed: 47.8 x 36.9 cm (18 13/16 x 14 1/2 in.)
• Collection: American - Painting
• Department: American Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1916.998

A detail from the museum

Painter Samuel Waldo began his formal art training when he was 16 years old.

Collection credit

Gift of J. H. Wade

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Exhibitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 3, no. 4 (1916): 1-3.
• "Jarvis's Portrait of Thomas Apthorp Cooper." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 5, no. 2/3 (1918): 20.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1925.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.