Harriet Sophia Jones
Artist
Erastus Salisbury Field
(American, 1805-1900)
CultureAmerican
Dateca. 1833
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions44 x 28 1/2 in. (111.8 x 72.4 cm)
Overall, Frame: 49 1/2 x 34 in. (125.7 x 86.4 cm)
Overall, Frame: 49 1/2 x 34 in. (125.7 x 86.4 cm)
Credit LineGift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch
Object number78.633.3
Not on view
DescriptionThis is an oil on canvas portrait of Harriet Sophia Jones at age four. She wears a grayish-white dress with small white polka dots and short puffed sleeves. The dress has an empire waistline and nearly comes down to her ankles leaving the bottom ruffle of her pantaloons visible. There are four strands of very small beads around her neck clasped together in a circular rose painted pendant. On her right arm is a basket filled with white and pink flowers (roses?) Her shoes are red and she stands on a brightly colored floor pattern which fades into the colorless background.;
Label TextErastus Salisbury Field American (1805-1900) Harriet Sophia Jones, ca. 1833 Oil on canvas Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch 78.633.3 The New England folk artist Erastus Salisbury Field was largely self-taught. During the first phase of his career he worked as an itinerant portrait painter in and around his hometown of Leverett, Massachusetts, and in the villages stretching south along the Connecticut River. He produced more than 150 portraits for his rural clientele in a frank, decidedly linear style. He enlivened these works with finely worked details of dress and setting, such as embroidered lace collars, pleated bonnets, and brightly patterned carpets. Field's most productive time as a country "face painter" came in the 1830s. It was at the beginning of that decade that he painted his portrait of Harriet Sophia Jones. Shown here at the age of four, Harriet (1829-1915) wears a fashionable Empire-style frock and carries a basket of pink roses. Her parents were Sophia Fuller (d. 1894) and Charles Backus Jones (d. 1878), who married in 1828 and settled in Monson, Massachusetts, some twenty miles south of Leverett. ProvenanceCollection of the Garbisches; Gift of Edgar William & Bernice Chrysler Garbisch to the Chrysler Museum, 1978. Exhibition History"Erastus Salisbury Field: 1805-1900," Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass., February 5 - April 1, 1984; National Museum of American Art and National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., June 10 - September 4, 1984; Museum of American Folk Art, New York, N.Y., November - December 1984; Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, San Antonio, Tex., January - February, 1985. (Exh. cat. no. 27) "Reopening of the Joan P. Brock Galleries," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., Opening in March of 2008. Published ReferencesMary Black, _Erastus Salisbury Field: 1805-1900_, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass., 1984, no. 27. ISBN: 0916746062 Chrysler Museum staff, "Museum Paintings on National Tour," _Chrysler Museum Bulletin_ 14, no. 8 (August 1984): not paged. Jefferson C. Harrison, _The Chrysler Museum Handbook of the European and American Collections: Selected Paintings, Sculpture and Drawings_ (Norfolk: The Chrysler Museum, 1991), 90, plate 67. ISBN: 0-940744-59-7, 0-940744-62-7 Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 41, no. 17. ISBN: 0-940744-71-6
