Dr. Thomas Fuller

Thomas Fuller had been practising medicine in Cooperstown, a village at the foot of Otsego Lake in upstate New York, since 1791, the year Samuel Morse was born. When Morse painted him in June 1829 the doctor had been looking after the village for nearly 40 years, and on the back of the canvas, before it was relined, the painter wrote his sitter's age in Latin, Aetat. 63, with the month, the year and his own initials, SFBM.

In the summers of 1827 and 1828 Morse had travelled upstate taking portrait commissions, and the Fullers had a family connection to the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, whose father had founded the village and who became a close friend of the painter. Morse painted the doctor's wife as well, as a companion piece. That November he sailed for Europe and stayed away three years.

The portrait stayed with Fuller's descendants for more than a century, passing from his daughter in Utica to family in Detroit, New Hampshire and Philadelphia, until Frederick Chase of Milton, Massachusetts, gave it to the museum in 1957.