John Drinker (12 March 1760–16 February 1826), painter, was born in Philadelphia and was the son of Susanna Allen Drinker and John Drinker, a bricklayer and merchant whose real estate holdings included property known as Drinker's Court along Union Street. Nothing is known of Drinker's education, training, or with whom he may have studied. He was active as an artist by June 1787, when he advertised in the Pennsylvania Packet that because of an increase in students he had moved his drawing school. He taught "the art of Drawing and Colouring, in all the different methods now in use" and noted that he would also draw portraits in miniature, crayons, and oil and engage in ornamental painting and painting on glass. Drinker operated his school at the house of Matthew Pratt, an accomplished portrait painter who had studied in London with Benjamin West and whose son was a neighbor of Drinker's first cousin, the prominent Quaker Henry Drinker. In Philadelphia, Drinker had access to contemporary portraits painted by Pratt, Charles Willson Peale, Charles Peale Polk, and other artists, but no work from Drinker's Philadelphia period has been identified.
Drinker first purchased land in Berkeley County in February 1788, a year after the death of his parents, from whom he had inherited property in Philadelphia. Identified as a resident of Philadelphia, for the next dozen years he divided his time between Berkeley County and his native city, where city directories continued occasionally to list him as a portrait painter. On 12 April 1797 Drinker executed a marriage bond in Berkeley County, and on that day or soon after he married Elizabeth Peppers. They had settled permanently in Berkeley by 1801, and Drinker sold his real estate and personal property in Philadelphia. About 1815 he completed construction of a two-story stone house on property located southwest of Bunker Hill that he had purchased seven years earlier. Drinker and his wife are not known to have had any children, although the 1820 census recorded that his household included two boys and a girl between the ages of ten and sixteen, who might have been family relations or orphans taken in by the couple to help with the farm work. At the time of the 1820 census Drinker, a Quaker, also owned seven enslaved workers.
Members of prominent families in Berkeley and Jefferson Counties are the subjects of Drinker's known portraits. Three portraits signed by Drinker have been documented and another five paintings attributed to him on stylistic grounds. The style of the sitters' clothing suggests that the portraits date to the last years of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth century. The portraits are all of individuals, including members of the Briscoe, Rutherford, and Washington families, and are generally turned to a three-quarter view. They share some technical characteristics, such as a long nose with rounded tip and almond-shaped eyes that appear slightly crossed. Drinker had difficulty painting hands convincingly. He used the convention of a vista seen from a balcony or through a window to lighten the background of the painting and to place his sitters within a defined space. His rendering of clothing, especially that of the female sitters, is detailed and colorful.
John Drinker died at his home on 16 February 1826 and was buried in the Morgan Chapel graveyard (later Bunker Hill Cemetery) in Berkeley County. Three of Drinker's portraits, including two signed by him, are in the collections of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Sources Consulted:
Birth and death dates on gravestone; biographies in E. Bryding Adams, "John Drinker, Portrait Painter and Limner," Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 7 (Nov. 1981): 14–29, Linda Crocker Simmons, "18th and 19th Century Artists Active in the Lower Shenandoah Valley," Winchester-Frederick County Historical Society Journal 4 (1989): 67–71, and John A. Cuthbert, Early Art and Artists in West Virginia: An Introduction and Biographical Directory (2000), 11–12, 171; Philadelphia Pennsylvania Packet, and Daily Advertiser, 18 June 1787 (quotation); Berkeley Co. Indexed Marriage Bonds (1789–1816); Berkeley Co. Deed Book, 8:222–224; "The Drinker Farm (John Drinker House Ruins)," Berkeley Journal 8 (1979): 58–66; Berkeley Co. Will Book, 8:233–234; death notice with variant death date of 17 Feb. 1826 ("Died, on Friday morning last") in Martinsburg Gazette and Public Advertiser, 23 Feb. 1826.