Early American Painting

Jonathan Adams Bartlett (1817–1902)
Portrait of Harriet, c. 1840
Jonathan Adams Bartlett spent most of his life in Maine, working as a farmer, carpenter, and self-taught portraitist. Portrait of Harriet presents the artist’s younger sister, Harriet Cushman Bartlett, dressed in an elegant black gown and seemingly interrupted while reading. She is seated by a table piled with volumes before a backdrop of columns, drapery, and a pastoral landscape. The awkward anatomy and perspective are characteristic of portraits by self-taught early-nineteenth-century artists, but with its elaborate background and provocative pose, Bartlett’s portrait suggests the sophisticated aspirations of painter and sitter alike. Little is known about Harriet, but this painting hints at her intellectual aspirations. In American portraiture, women reading books sometimes signals piety, but the abundance of reading matter in this portrait seems to confirm the subject’s interest in literature.
Learn more about this painting on the Terra Foundation website.
Early American Painting

John Lewis Krimmel (1786–1821)
Blind Man's Buff, 1814

John Singleton Copley (1738–1815)
Portrait of Mrs. John Stevens (Judith Sargent, later Mrs. John Murray), 1770–72

Rembrandt Peale (1778–1860)
George Washington, Porthole Portrait, after 1824

Edward Hicks (1780–1849)
A Peaceable Kingdom with Quakers Bearing Banners, c. 1829–1830

Ammi Phillips (1788–1865)
Girl in a Red Dress, c. 1835

Erastus Salisbury Field (1805–1900)
Portrait of a Woman said to be Clarissa Gallond Cook, in front of a Cityscape, c. 1838

Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872)
Gallery of the Louvre, 1831–33

Washington Allston (1779–1843)
Lorenzo and Jessica, 1832

Jonathan Adams Bartlett (1817–1902)
Portrait of Harriet, c. 1840

Thomas Sully (1783–1872)
Portrait of Blanch Sully, 1839