William Ellery Channing

Allston painted his brother-in-law in 1811, in his last months in Boston. Two years before, he had married Ann Channing, the minister's sister, and in July 1811 the couple sailed for England, taking with them a young pupil, Samuel Morse, the future inventor of the telegraph. William Ellery Channing was 31 and had been preaching at the Federal Street church in Boston since 1803. In 1819 he gave a sermon in Baltimore, published as Unitarian Christianity, that made him the leading voice of the liberal Unitarian wing of the New England churches. Here he is still the young pastor, shown half-length in a black coat and white neckcloth against a dark ground. Allston gave him the canvas, and it stayed with Channing until his death in 1842, then with his son, William Francis Channing. The son had made his own mark on Boston. With the engineer Moses Farmer he designed the city's electric fire alarm telegraph, first switched on in 1852. He gave his father's portrait to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1897.