Description:
portrait; woman; costume/uniform
Label Text:
Erastus Salisbury Field and his twin sister, Salome, were born in Leverett, Massachusetts, in 1805, the third and forth children and namesakes of their parents. Field's first formal instruction in the arts was brief, an apprenticeship in 1824/25 in New York City with the artist Samuel F.B.Morse. His career as an itinerant artist began in 1826, with many commissions resulting from the ties of extended families across Massachusetts and within a roughly 200 mile range, including Worcester to the east, Hartford, Connecticut, and Hudson, new York, to the south. In 1836, Field traveled to western Massachusetts, where he painted the portraits of ten members of the Bassett family of Lee. Bethiah Smith was born in Sandwich, Massachusetts, in 1761 and married Nathaniel Basset in 1781. Bethiah and Nathaniel Bassett raised a large family of nine surviving children. Field's portrait of Bethiah in her fine cap and shawl is entirely sympathetic but at the same time frank, without glossing over the physical facts of age or neglecting the evidence of a mustache above her upper lip. After Nathaniel's death in 1846, Bethiah was comfortably provided for until her own death three years later.
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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=SC+1985.29.2 |
