The historic property Point Breeze in Bordentown recently became news when it was purchased for public use by the City of Bordentown, D&R Greenway, and the State of New Jersey.
While the property’s history includes evidence of Native American and colonial settler usage, it is best known as the home of Joseph Bonaparte, who played an important part in European history and created U.S. history for his world-class library and art collection and creating what has been argued was the nation’s first major landscape architecture project.
A painting in the New Jersey State Museum by New Jersey-born artist Charles B. Lawrence captures a view of the Point Breeze mansion on a high hill and the estate’s human-made lagoon connecting to the Crosswicks River. The work was donated to the collection by Mr. and Mrs. Harry L. Jones in 1962.
The following note from “Selections from the American Art Collection of the New Jersey state Museum” provides some insight on the artist and the site:
Known in this time as a fine portrait and landscape painter, Charles B. Lawrence was born near Bordentown, New Jersey, in the late 1790s. He settled in Philadelphia in 1813, when first exhibiting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He is thought to have studied with Rembrandt Peale and Gilbert Stuart, two prominent transmitters of British pictorial styles.
Until about 1837, when he quit painting for commerce, Lawrence was a competent portrait artist active in Philadelphia. He was employed as a clerk in the Bank of Penn Township in 1840-42 and, later, as a plumber in Philadelphia in 1844-56. From the works attributed to him, Lawrence was an able painter. His oils show technical sophistication in the preparation of canvas and the application of pigment.
Lawrence’s method of execution, minutely accurate and exquisitely rendered, borrows form contemporary English landscape painters. Their influence is evident in the “Breeze Point” paintings, a pair of landscapes of the luxurious estate of Joseph Bonaparte.
Bonaparte, the eldest brother of Napoleon I and the exited king of both Naples and Spain, acquired the vast property overlooking the Delaware River near Bordentown, New Jersey, sometime after 1815, following his emigration to America. He surrounded his handsome manor house with a thousand acres of parkland and decorated it with one of the finest and most extensive art collections of the time.
