George Berkeley’s ‘Bermuda Group’
In 1729, Anglo-Irish cleric and philosopher Dean George Berkeley [1685-1753] set out from London to found a college in Bermuda “for the better supplying of churches in our foreign plantations and for converting the savage Americans to Christianity.”
Bermuda would provide the ideal setting for the philosopher’s social and educational experiment.
“Young Americans, educated in an island at some distance from their own country, will more easily be kept under discipline till they have attained a complete education,” he said.
While on the continent, they “might find opportunities of running away to their countrymen.”
But being in Bermuda would prevent the Native American youngsters from “returning to their brutal customs, before they were thoroughly imbued with good principles and habits.”
Berkeley’s friend John Wainwright commissioned a portrait of the members of the expedition from John Smibert, a minor Scottish painter whom Berkeley had invited to teach art in the Bermuda college.
Painter John Smilbert’s “Bermuda Group”
The painting — titled “The Bermuda Group (Dean Berkeley and His Entourage)” – was started in London and completed after the group arrived in Newport, Rhode Island to await additional funding for their Bermuda college.
Although Wainwright did not accompany Berkeley to the New World, Smibert places him prominently in the foreground.
Dean Berkeley stands at the right next to his infant son Henry, his wife Anne, and her companion Miss Handcock. The two wigged gentlemen are John James and Richard Dalton, administrators for the proposed new Bermuda college.
At the far left, looking out at the viewer, stands the artist himself. When the Bermuda college scheme failed, Smibert, the first academy-trained painter to work in the American colonies, established a studio in Boston, where he became the city’s most sought-after portraitist, enjoying a lofty professional reputation. “The Bermuda Group” would remain his most ambitious work.
As the most sophisticated group portrait painted in the British colonies during the first half of the 18th century, it was a source of inspiration to numerous artists during the succeeding 80 years. It now hangs at Yale University.
Bermuda’s Berkeley Institute — opened at Samaritan’s Lodge on Court Street in 1897 — took its name from the clergyman whose plan to establish a college in Bermuda had foundered more than a century earlier. The Berkeley Educational Society had been established by a group of Bermudians in 1879 to revive his vision of a college in Bermuda and spent 18 years raising funds to establish the new school.
The Californian city of Berkeley is also named after the Christian philosopher.
