Description:
Oil painting by artist Erastus Salisbury Field (1805-1900), scene depicts an outdoor landscape of a forest or glade of tall trees with a stream passing through the center of the composition, there is a small area of blue sky at the top of the painting, there are several groups of small figures enjoying the landscape, three people in the foreground, a pair of people with a third person behind them near the stream, a man walking away from the stream, and a small group of individuals in the far distance, the painting is not signed, a typed paper label on the back of the painting reads: "THE MAPLES/ Painted by:/Erastus Salisbury Field/ 1805-1900/ Location of scene is immediately to the south of this house. [and in ink pen] 601 Amherst Road/ Sunderland Mass." This is the Hubbard Tavern property in Sunderland, MA. The family in the painting are the Hubbards, and the painting descended in the family. 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. They also often depict their subjects with triangular-shaped shoulders and elf-like ears. 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; he 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 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.

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