THOMAS S. NOBLE AND HIS PAINTINGS by Mary Noble Welleck Garretson AMONG recent acquisitions of The New-York Historical L Society are a portrait of the American artist, Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835-1 go7), and two of his historical paintings. One, "John Brown's Blessing," shows a negro child being blessed by the abolitionist as he was led to execution. It was recent history when the picture was painted in 1867. The other painting is variously called "The Salem Martyr" or "Witch Hill," the latter being the title favored by the artist and carved on the heavy walnut frame originally made for it by the English woodcarver, William Fry. "Witch Hill" was painted in Cincinnati, in i86g, and depicts a young woman in the days of the Salem, Massachusetts, witchcraft terror. The young woman who posed as the condemned witch was a librarian in the Cincinnati Library, and was a lineal descendant of a woman who was actually hanged as a witch in seventeenth- century Salem. Each painting is a worthy memorial to a dramatic period of our country's history and to the artist, in whose memory his children gave them to the Society. Thomas Satterwhite Noble was thoroughly American. He was born on May 2gth, 1835, at Lexington, Kentucky. His father was Thomas Hart Noble, descendant of a Virginia family which had pushed across the mountains to settle Kentucky. His mother was Rosamond Johnson, daughter of Dr. Johnson, head of the medical school at Lexington. Thomas S. Noble was the oldest of four children, and was brought up in a typical well-to-do household of the time. Besides a plantation, his father had a rope walk. Labor was performed by slaves until shortly before the Civil War, when Thomas Hart Noble freed them and hired them at wages, allowing them the same living quarters they had had before. They were devoted to the fam- ■ 113 —