John Lee Douglas Mathies ,Gentleman, Oil on Canvas J· L·D· Mathies，Artist. Best Known for his portraits of the Seneca chief Red Jacket and the Quaker mystic Jemima Wilkinson, Mathies also notably painted the 1821 wreck of the Walk-in-the-Water, the first steamboat on Lake Erie. Born into a family of immigrants from Scotland, he used the original spelling of his surname rather than the Anglicized versions "Mathews" and "Matthews" adopted by other relatives, signing his work "J.L.D. Mathies". One of at least ten siblings, he grew up in Coila, a Scottish farming settlement near the village of Cambridge in Washington County, New York. After the deaths of his parents in 1795, J.L.D. came to abandon the austere Presbyterianism of his childhood to become a free-thinker, a choice reflected in his pursuit of unconventional subjects to paint. He was particularly inspired by the Seneca Indians, and his work is distinguished from other regional artists of the period by its sensitivity and technical refinement. In 1815 he opened an art school in Canandaiuga, New York, and after it proved unsuccessful, he moved to Rochester in 1823. Although he painted landscapes of western New York and the falls at Niagara, popular subjects he also found personally compelling, he was forced to subsidize his art career as the proprietor of the Clinton House Hotel, among other business ventures, which at one point included a brief collaboration in an art gallery with his nephew and rising star in the art world, when he died at age 54 in 1834.