Description:
Framed oil on canvas portrait of two children - a boy and girl. The younger boy sits in a wooden high chair with an open book on his lap and his feet on the chair's foot rest. He is dressed in buff colored pants (nankeen?) with a white ruffled shirt and blue-black coat, and a white neckerchief. The girl stands next to her brother with her hand resting on the arm of the high chair, she has a red dress of the 1830s with puffy sleeves and white pantaloons. She wears a coral bead necklace. Her hair is parted in the center and pulled back. Behind her is an open window and behind the boy is a red drapery. Both stand on a patterned wool carpet. The portrait has a gilt wooden frame. The frame label reads, "Children of the Sayre Family of Silversmiths/ Attributed to Oliver T. Eddy, (1799-1868)." John Sayre worked from circa 1796 to 1818 as a gold- and silversmith in New York City. His workshop was located at 281 Pearl Street until 1801 and at the same address as his brother Joel Sayre from 1802-18. Joel died at his brother Simon's house in Cairo, New York in 1818, leaving two young children as orphans. (The date of this painting does not correlate with the ages of Joel's children.) John Sayre moved to Cohoes, New York in 1824 to become the director of cotton factory until the factory burned in 1829. He died in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1852.
Label Text:
Oliver Tarbell Eddy was an American painter. He was born in Greenbush, Vermont. His father Isaac Eddy was a printer, inventor, and engraver. Eddy was taught copper engraving by his father. He taught himself painting. In 1822, he married Jane Maria Burger, daughter of the silversmith Thomas Burger, in Newburgh, New York. He moved to New York City in 1826, where he worked painting portraits and miniatures. In the early 1830s, he moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and moved to Newark, New Jersey in 1835. He painted numerous portraits in Newark, particularly of the city's rising industrial elite. Eddy moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 1841. In addition to painting portraits, he invented an early precursor of the typewriter and patented several other inventions. In 1850, he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he lived until his death. He is buried in Woodlands Cemetery. Eddy's portraits follow many conventions of formal portraiture of the period but are distinctly naïve in many respects. In this portrait of the Sayre children, Eddy delineated his subjects with tight brushstrokes and delighted in rendering clothing and furnishings. Historic Deerfield also owns an example of an Eddy engraving, The Death of Pike [HD 2019.11.1]
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2023.9.19 |
