One of the last paintings done by Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828) before his death and unfinished in the sense that background and dress have been barely suggested, this portrait of Jared Sparks belongs with other such “unfinished” but superb late Stuart works as the portraits of Thomas Motley, Nathaniel Bowditch, and Washington Allston. They may well owe their character as much to a loss of interest on the artist’s part in the rendering of the appurtenances to a likeness and to his preoccupation with the face and what he saw in it as to a lack of opportunity to bring the paintings to completion. The portrait of Sparks, oil on canvas, measures 25” x 20” and is owned by The New Britain Museum of American Art (Lawrence and Smith Funds), having earlier been in the possession of Sparks’ grandson, Professor Jared Sparks Moore of Cleveland. The portrait was begun in 1827, the sittings apparently continuing until March 1828, when Sparks left Boston for several months in Europe. (Lawrence Park, Gilbert Stuart, an Illustrated Descriptive List of his Works, New York, 1926, 2:706–707; Gilbert Stuart, Portraitist of the Young Republic, Washington and Providence, 1967, p. 106, 111–113.)

Jared Sparks (1789–1866) in the years close to the time he was sitting to Stuart was still unmarried; was just beginning to accomplish his pioneering efforts to edit and publish American historical documents; was the owner and editor of the North American Review , 1824–1830; and was engrossed in his labors of locating and copying documents relating to the diplomacy of the Revolution. He was to publish his monumental Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution in twelve volumes in 1829–1830. Despite its marked editorial deficiencies, it established his reputation and defined a point of view about the Revolutionary period that so insisted upon the rightness of all that Washington and Franklin believed and did that it minimized the contributions and impugned the judgment, if not the integrity, of those like John Adams, John Jay, Arthur Lee, and Henry Laurens who often differed with one or the other of them (see below, p. 214–215). It was Sparks’ representation of events xiiiperhaps more than any other single thing which forced the descendants of John Adams into a defensive posture and made three generations of them into perceptive students and interpreters of the early years of the Nation.

During the years covered by these volumes of the Diary, Charles Francis Adams and Jared Sparks remained on fairly familiar terms. Sparks and his copyist had the daily use of Adams’ study in his house on Hancock Avenue from November 1829 to March 1830 as Sparks searched the twenty-one volumes of John Adams’ letterbooks which John Quincy Adams had made available there for that purpose. Despite worsening relations between Sparks and the elder Adams as Sparks’ opinions of Jay and Lee appeared, Charles Francis Adams continued to observe the amenities. (See volume 3:88, 92, 160–161, 202–203; below, p. 214–215, 395.)

Sparks’ literary and archival labors were carried forward assiduously in the United States and abroad. During the next decade he completed The Life of Gouverneur Morris, 3 volumes, Boston, 1832; The Writings of George Washington, 12 volumes, Boston, 1834–1837; The Works of Benjamin Franklin, 10 volumes, Boston, 1836–1840. Rewards came in his appointment as McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard in 1839 and his election as President of the University ten years later. (Dictionary of American Biography, New York, 1928–1936; L. H. Butterfield, “Archival and Editorial Enterprise in 1850 and in 1950: Some Comparisons and Contrasts,” American Philosophical Society, Proceedings, 98 [1954]:159–170.)