Description:
Full-length portrait of two young girls, one dressed in a white dress and the other in a vibrant blue garment. The background is an expansive mountain landscape and the scenery includes natural elements, including a tree stump and flowers. The portrait is signed J.G. Chandler 1854 (lower left).
Label Text:
The artist Joseph Goodhue Chandler (1813-1884) was a nineteenth-century New England artist who often painted portraits in the Connecticut River Valley. Chandler was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, and trained as a land manager and became a farm owner. He was also apprenticed as a cabinetmaker and studied painting with William Collins in 1827 in Albany, New York. His earliest portraits date to 1837, and in 1840 he married Lucretia Ann Waite (1820-1868), also a portrait painter. From 1840-1850, the Chandlers were itinerant artists who traveled across northwestern Massachusetts. During this period, he completed academic portraits of adults in darker tones and children in vibrant colors set in landscape settings. In 1854, the Chandlers moved to Boston and established a studio, and by 1850 moved to Hubbardston and bought a farm. Compared to his other portraits of children, the Graves painting suggests the artist’s skill in rendering precise details and the sitter’s individual features. He perhaps intended to evoke the landscape of northwestern Massachusetts in the background, though he took creative liberties with the mountain ranges. Moreover, Chandler conveyed a sense of childhood play, including the stick and hoop and Ella’s mislaid shoe. Chandler also collaborated with his wife Lucretia Waite on portrait commissions, and she would supposedly “finish” up his canvases. The rendering of the bows on the blue dress of one sitter corresponds to Lucretia’s painting style.
According to genealogy research, the two girls are Fannie and Ella Graves. The young girls were residents of Conway, Massachusetts and Brooklyn, New York in the mid-nineteenth century. Chandler likely completed this portrait when based in his Boston studio or traveling along the Connecticut River Valley. They were the daughters of Rufus Rowe Graves (b. Sunderland, Massachusetts, 1807-1876), and his second wife, Mary Jane Arms, who he married in September 1839 in Conway. Both girls were born in Brooklyn, New York: Fannie on March 8, 1845, when the family lived on Cranberry Street behind Plymouth Church, and Ella on March 30, 1853. The provenance of the portrait can also be traced to descendants of the Graves family of Massachusetts, through Fannie (1845-1915). The work is also signed and dated on the lower left side of the painting.
The girls’ father was Rufus Rowe Graves (1807-1876), a New England merchant based in New York, who became a partner in his father’s wholesale raw cotton business after 1828. Graves led the firm E.A. & R.R. Graves, and the firm were large buyers of cotton in the mid-nineteenth century (1842-1874). The company would ship cotton to Northern locations, likely for New England mills. According to his will, Graves left a large fund for the education of Black children in the South. Rufus Graves, like other New York merchants, likely profited from these Southern plantations prior to the 1860s, and served as a conduit between the South and New England suppliers.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2024.3 |
