Jonathan K. Trego|J. L. Williams

Jonathan K. Trego and J. L. Williams were American painters whose sole documented collaboration, 'Trappers' (ca. 1855), hangs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Trego was born in 1817 in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he likely studied with Thomas Sully. A prolific portraitist shaped by Quaker origins, Trego regarded painting as a trade, producing perceptive likenesses of lawyers, farmers, and their prize animals across Philadelphia and Detroit. His portraits of judges still hang in the Doylestown courthouse, and he also painted genre scenes and images of Western frontier life. He was the father of William B. T. Trego, who later became a noted military history painter. J. L. Williams remains far more obscure, recorded only as active between 1853 and 1858. Their joint work, an oil on canvas measuring 25 by 30 inches, entered The Met in 1985 as a gift from Dr. Arthur Localio. The painting shows two trappers in deerskins accompanied by four hunting dogs, with a drooping brown horse standing ankle-deep in snow. The Metropolitan Museum notes that the image combines naïveté of execution with realism of content, the horse's posture particularly conveying the rigors of the fur trade. Trego exhibited intermittently at the Pennsylvania Academy from 1852 through 1888, while Williams left no other trace in major collections.