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A “New” Portrait with “Old” Kentucky Roots

In 2024, descendants of Justice Robert Trimble donated an early nineteenth-century portrait of their ancestor. The portrait depicts Trimble around the time of his appointment as a federal district judge for the District of Kentucky in 1817. Trimble previously served on the Kentucky Court of Appeals and ran a successful private law practice. In 1826, President John Quincy Adams appointed Trimble to the Supreme Court, but his tenure lasted only two years. He died of a sudden illness during the summer of 1828.

The well-executed portrait is a period copy of a work in the collection of the Kentucky Historical Society by Matthew Harris Jouett, one of the most prolific portrait painters of the nineteenth century. Over the course of his career, Jouett captured two additional Supreme Court Justices with Kentucky roots, Thomas Todd and John McKinley.