Description:
Oil portrait of Betsey Dole Hubbard (1794-1862) by Erastus Salisbury Field (1805-1900) who did the oil painting on an enlarged albumen photograph, which is attached to a light stretched fabric. The painting descended in the Hubbard family to Parker Dole Hubbard (1919-1994), son of George Caleb Hubbard (b.1878) and Florence Graves Hubbard, grandson of Parker Dole Hubbard (1825-1895) and Elizabeth Newton Hubbard (1842-1915), great-grandson of Ashley Hubbard (1792-1861) and Betsey Dole Hubbard, and great-great grandson of Caleb Hubbard (1754-1850) and Lucretia Ashley Hubbard (1767-1853) of the Hubbard Tavern in the Plumtree section of Sunderland. Born in Leverett, Mass., Field worked mainly painting the middle-class citizens of rural New England. Though he studied painting with Samuel F. B. Morse (1791-1872) in New York for 3 months from Dec. 1824 to Feb. 1825, Field continued to paint in a country style. His portraits, with their flat compositions and blunt directness, were popular in rural towns and small cities along the Connecticut River Valley, from Greenfield and Northampton in the north to Hartford and New Haven in the south. His rapid style conveyed details of clothing and facial expressions with minimum brushwork; Field could complete a full portrait of an adult sitter in a day's time at a cost of $5, and created over 1500 paintings over his career. Although each portrait captures a distinct personality, his portraits share stiffly formal characteristics such as refined silk dresses, woolen coats, and mahogany furniture, along with other symbols of fashion, status, education, and civic-mindedness. The early portraits often depict their subjects with triangular-shaped shoulders and elf-like ears. The nephew of Lucretia Ashley Hubbard and Caleb Hubbard, Field stayed with the Hubbard family in Plumtrees from 1836, off and on during his career, and painted 11 members of the family. HD's collection of Hubbard family portraits by Field include: Caleb Hubbard (HD 89.044) and his wife, Lucretia Ashley Hubbard (HD 89.045); daughter Harriet Henderson Hubbard (2005.12.2); their son, Ashley Hubbard (HD 89.010) and two of his wife, Betsy Dole Hubbard (HD 89.010 and 89.046); and children, Israel Wales Hubbard (HD 2005.1), Nancy Henderson Hubbard (HD 2012.6), Parker Dole Hubbard (2005.21), Stephen Ashley Hubbard (HD 91.002), and Elizabeth Peck Hubbard (HD 91.002). After decades as an itinerant portrait painter, Field met the new competition from photography (introduced by his former teacher, Morse) by using the technology to provide his portraits with sharper realism, a skill he probably learned during his stay in NYC from 1841-1848. In 1854, Field moved to Palmer, Mass. where he opened "Field's Gallery of Oil paintings, Photographs & Daguerreotypes" where he worked until 1859. In this example, Field enlarged the photographic image on canvas and entirely painted over it; photographers had begun using solar cameras to make enlargements in the early 1850's, and by the 1860s many artists were pasting on canvas and painting over those enlarged images. Field later became interested in romantic, imaginative landscapes that illustrate religious allegories, and political and historical narratives, the best-known being his "Historical Monument of the American Republic" in the Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Mass. The half-length portrait of Betsey Dole Hubbard sitting in a red-upholstered chair (a standard prop in Field's portraits) with a rounded, carved crest rail shows her at about age 65 with dark hair parted in the middle under a loose white cap, her face heavily wrinkled and sunken-cheeked, and wearing a white scarf under a plleated black dress held together at her neck with a rectangular gilt-rimmed pin that may be one of the mourning pins (HD 89.084-89.085) given by Parker Dole Hubbard.
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