Existing comment:
Erastus Salisbury Field
Portrait of a Girl, ca 1835-45
Standing in a domestic interior, the adolescent girl in this full-length portrait holds The Juvenile Plutarch in her gloved right hand. Printed in 1827, the book was a popular instruction manual for young ladies. It reads: "nothing can be conceived more amiable than a union of mental and personal charms. Beauty alone may please at first sight, but it will cease to afford admiration, unless it is adorned by ... an improved understanding ... a lively virtue and a rational piety."
Field was born in Leverett, Massachusetts, an agrarian community in the Connecticut River Valley. Beginning with early images rendered on cardboard scraps from a local box factory, he made a career that spanned the decades from the 1820s to the 1880s. Combining the clean, broad strokes of traditional "folk" art with the tonal variations or academic painting, Field's work displays the influence of his teacher, Samuel EB Morse, a student of Benjamin West and first president of the National Academy of Design. Morse is credited with popularizing daguerreotypes in America. This early method of portrait photography influenced Field's work, as evidenced her in the vaporous quality of the figure's background, which gives the illusion of receding smoke. |