Captain Isaac Foster by Badger, Joseph

Joseph Badger painted this portrait of Captain Isaac Foster in 1755, on a surprising material: bed ticking, the coarse striped fabric used for mattress covers. It now hangs in a museum, but the man in the brown jacket was one of colonial Boston's quiet rebels.

Look at his face. Badger gives him a direct, slightly flushed presence, a man who has sat for a portrait on his own terms. The details of his dress, the starched neckcloth, the lace cuff, the wig, all signal his status. But his hand on the ornamental table suggests calm authority, not defiance.

The defiance was in his private life. Isaac Foster lived openly with two women, both of whom he referred to as his wife. In Puritan Boston, this was a civic and spiritual crisis. Church elders summoned him and demanded he choose one woman and send the other away. He agreed to do so, then simply did not. For years, his household remained intact, a quiet middle finger to the social order.

He never achieved a historical fame that matched his nerve, but this portrait, painted on a humble mattress cover, preserves the face of a man who decided the rules of his own life were nobody else's business.