On August 28, 1856, at the end of a conference for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Albany, the visiting scientists met with many of New York’s political elite to witness the inauguration of the Dudley Observatory. The event probably looked something like this:
This is a painting by Thompkinss Matteson (1813-1884), a successful painter out of New York City and Sherburne, NY. It’s a fairly large piece – 56 x 72 inches – and it was completed the year after the inauguration. Completed for whom is the question; there doesn’t seem to be any record of the painting until it was donated to the Albany Institute of History and Art in 1917. No one knows who commissioned it. That’s actually important, because the inauguration brought together several competing factions in Albany politics. Depending on which faction commissioned it, there may be some faces missing.
Many of the faces are too vague to identify. Most of those that can be seen have been identified. Here Dudley is indebted to Norman Rice, former director of the AIHA, Ian Bartky and Christine Bain of the NYS Library for painstakingly matching faces to portraits and identifying the people pictured here. Their conclusions were published in a paper titles “An Event of No Ordinary Interest: The Inauguration of Albany’s Dudley Observatory,” in 1999.
Interestingly, several of the people pictured here were probably not in attendance. Former President Millard Fillmore is pictured on the far left, but there is no record that he was attending. Matthew Fontaine Maury, Superintendent of the US Naval Observatory, is pictured in the middle, again despite the fact that there’s no record of his attendence. This is interesting, because Maury was a rival of many members of the Scientific Committee, including Alexander Bache. Was this a jab at the Scientific Committee?
A guide and a full list of the identified attendees after the jump: