James Edward Freeman

Freeman would also have been familiar with 18th-century European fancy pictures by Joshua Reynolds, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Thomas Gainsborough, as well as the 17th-century secular works by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo that inspired the genre.

He carried letters of introduction from Morse to the esteemed Anglo-American painter Charles Robert Leslie in London and the eminent Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen in Rome.

Freeman and Crawford were allowed to attend the life school of the so-called English Academy, which convened nightly to work from nude models in the deconsecrated church of San Giovanni della Ficozza at Via dei Maroniti 29.

Assisted by his Albany political connections, namely Dix, Horatio Seymour, Thurlow Weed, and William H. Seward, he lobbied the administration of Martin Van Buren for a consulship to enable him to settle permanently in Italy.

He personally erected the American flag on Margaret Fuller's balcony on Locanda Dies in via Gregoriana, fearing that her pro-Italian, anti-French dispatches to the New York Tribune could have placed her in danger.

[2] Most significantly, Freeman contrived a sort of improvised passport for thousands of Italians who faced certain death if captured by the French or Austrians, ensuring their safe passage out of Italy and, ostensibly, to America.

All of this he apparently did out of personal conviction and with the expectation that his diplomatic post would immunize him from prosecution; however, his consulship to Ancona was suddenly revoked and given to the sculptor Joseph Mozier and a new consul replaced Brown at Rome.

For more than forty years, Freeman remained a prominent fixture of the vibrant art scene in Rome, painting fancy pictures of humble Italian contadini, impish street urchins, Madonna-like rustic beauties, and blind mendicants for an international clientele.

These sentimental character studies were appealing for their artless beauty, an ideal closely allied to the 18th-century cult of sensibility, which advocated that strong emotional responses to visual and literary stimuli could help foster compassion and ethical behavior.

American tourists, however, were slow to return to Rome after the political tumult that defined the late 1840s, so he began to cultivate a new base of European⎯primarily English⎯clients, who already recognized and esteemed the idiom of the fancy picture in which he specialized.

Freeman alternated chapters on some of the eminent people he knew in Rome, such as John Gibson, William Makepeace Thackeray, Crawford, and the Italian Princess Borghese (née Guindalina Talbot) with others devoted to the contadini who populated his fancy pictures, such as Giovannina of Saracinesca, the young boy Angelo, and “La Nonna," who he called "my venerable model.” The memoirs proved popular with both the public and the critics, and they were likened to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun and Our Old Home, as well as to William Wetmore Story’s Roba di Roma.