Description:
boy; girl; portrait; costume/uniform
Label Text:
William Mathew Prior was born in Bath, Maine, where he first worked as a sign and ornamental painter, advertising himself as a portrait painter for the first time in 1828. That same year he married Rosamond Hamblin and joined an extended family with her brothers Sturtevant, Joseph, Nathaniel and Eli, all four of whom were painters, a traditional occupation among males of several generations of the Hamblin line. From Portland, Maine, where Prior had moved with his wife in the early 1830's, the Prior/Hamblin households moved to Boston, where the in-laws are recorded as living together in Nathaniel Hamblin's house on Chambers Street by 1841. This double portrait of an unidentified brother an sister is signed and dated "June 1853" on the verso of the canvas. When it was painted, in Prior's less expensive "flat style", the artist had moved his family into a house at 36 Trenton Street ("The Painting Garret"), where he worked and lived from 1846 until his death in 1873.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1990.5.16 |
