The Remarkable Career of Tom Molineaux

By Bethany J. McGlyn, WPAMC Class of 2020

As first year WPAMC fellows, we recently began our connoisseurship training with Senior Curator of Ceramics and Glass, Leslie Grigsby, for a five-week ceramics block. My favorite part of ceramics block was the oral presentation, for which we each picked a ceramic object in Winterthur’s collection to research and share with Leslie and the rest of the cohort. We were given many objects to choose from, but I was immediately drawn to a small yellow jug.

The jug is a piece of English Yellow-Glazed Earthenware that was made in Staffordshire in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The yellow-glazed jug is decorated with red enamel painting and two black transfer prints – the subject of which proved a fascinating story.

Tom Molineaux, depicted on the left, was born into slavery in Virginia in 1784. As a young man, Tom and other enslaved men were made to fight for their owners who would wage bets on their bloody contests. Legend has it that Tom Molineaux, after winning a fight against which his owner’s son had bet one hundred thousand dollars, earned his freedom. Whether or not this rather incredible story is true, Tom Molineaux was a free man, and the champion boxer of the United States, by 1809.

In search of new competition, Tom Molineaux traveled to the United Kingdom where he won his first two matches under the coaching of Bill Richmond, another formerly enslaved man-turned boxer. Riding on his early successes in London, Molineaux faced British boxing hero Tom Cribb, depicted on the right, on 3 December 1810 for the English title.

The English expected Tom Cribb to win quickly, but Tom Molineaux proved a powerful opponent. By the nineteenth round, the crowd – who heavily favored Cribb – grew impatient, and a riotous group rushed the ring. Molineaux came out of the skirmish with a broken hand, but resolved to stay in the fight. However, Cribb took longer than the allotted thirty seconds to return to his starting position – an infraction that should have immediately ceded the match to Molineaux. Tom Molineaux persisted, despite what must have been intense physical pain, for thirty-four rounds before ultimately losing to Cribb.

The controversies surrounding Tom Molineaux and Tom Cribb’s 1810 match led to a famous rivalry. When the two fought again on 28 September 1811, there were over fifteen thousand spectators in attendance. Among the spectators were British artist George Cruikshank, who documented the famous fight, and inspired the decoration on Winterthur’s little yellow jug.

I’m lucky to have learned a great deal about the ceramics collection at Winterthur over the past five weeks with my classmates, but I feel even luckier to have come across the remarkable story of Tom Molineaux. In the case of a little yellow jug, what seemed at first like a simple boxing scene turned out to be a fascinating story of Molineaux’s career. For Tom Molineaux, boxing was at first a condition of his enslavement. But once free, he reclaimed his talent, his strength, and his perseverance – a form of resistance that would lead him to a period of fame on both sides of the Atlantic.