Thomas Attwood Digges

by Joshua Reynolds

Kenneth Bowling disputes the attribution of this portrait in Peter Charles L'Enfant: vision, honor and male friendship in the early American Republic:

Thomas Attwood Digges (1742-1821 ) was L'Enfant's good friend and would prove to be his most generous protector. He supplied encouragement in L'Enfant's petition claims against New York City and the federal government, he lent a sympathetic ear (since he was pursuing his own claims at the same time), and he granted L'Enfant blessed asylum on his Maryland plantation, "Warburton Manor," where the "old Major" lived for ten of the last eleven years of his life. This portrait of Digges may be the one that family tradition attributes to Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). A document among the family's papers indicates that the greatest portraitist in Georgian England did indeed paint Digges around 1775-81. But modern scientific analysis can neither confirm nor deny that this was the painting; the family lost custody of the work during the settlement of an estate in 1957 and its location is no longer known. The only reproduction is this photo, which appeared in the pages of the Records of the Columbia Historical Society in 1904. (Robert H. Elias and Eugene D. Finch, eds., Letters of Thomas Attwood Digges (1742-1821) [Columbia, S.C., 1982], pp. xviii, Ixxii-Ixxiii) (Courtesy of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.)

Actually, another photo of the portrait appears in Paul Wilstach's 1921 book, Potomac Landings

Thomas Atwood Digges
Of Warburton Manor, from the portrait attibuted to Sir
Joshua Reynolds