Henry Lillie Pierce

In 1883 Henry Lillie Pierce gave his chocolate a new trademark. He owned the Walter Baker company at Dorchester, just south of Boston, and he borrowed the image from an 18th-century pastel in the Dresden picture gallery by the Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, a young maid in a white apron carrying a cup of chocolate on a tray. As La Belle Chocolatière she went onto Baker's packaging for generations. Pierce had started at the mill in 1849 as a clerk on three dollars a week and turned it into the largest business of its kind in America. Along the way he was twice elected mayor of Boston and sat for two terms in Congress. In 1895 he commissioned this portrait from Léon Bonnat in Paris, and the canvas is signed and dated that year at the upper left. Pierce died in December 1896. He left his country place at Ponkapoag, south of the city, to his close friends, the writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich and his family, and in 1898 the Aldriches' twin sons gave the portrait to the museum. His will had remembered the museum too, and in 1899 money from his bequest bought Turner's Slave Ship.