Bentley Simons Runyan Family

In 1837, the English-born itinerant painter Frederick Elmore Cohen began a successful painting studio in the fast-developing city of Detroit, producing religious, historical, genre, and portrait works. In an 1845 self-portrait, now in the Detroit Institute of Arts, the artist depicted himself as a dashing young man conspicuously holding a paintbrush in his right hand.

After relocating to Ohio in 1854, Cohen found a loyal patron in Bentley Simons Runyan, a hardware merchant and entrepreneur who founded the Mansfield Gas Company and introduced gas lighting to the town. Runyan is shown here with his family, proudly posed in front of their luxurious, newly built Greek revival home. When Cohen completed the painting about 1857, the Runyans had only four children. A later artist added the couple's youngest daughter, Mary Ellen, born in 1859, in the curve of her mother's left arm. Other changes by this unknown artist include altering Bentley Runyan's left arm, originally depicted by Cohen as lifted to direct the viewer's gaze to the house (and now dropped to his side), and repainting the house from its original red brick color to a pale yellow green, as it may have been repainted in later years.

Runyan commissioned at least three paintings from Cohen, including another in the AMAM collection, a portrait of his daughter Almeda Runyan from about 1856. Bentley Runyan was the grandfather of Mary Parsons McCullough, a 1907 Oberlin College graduate, whose husband James Caldwell McCullough taught chemistry at the College from 1907 through 1949. These two paintings formerly hung in their Oberlin home.