Fig. 1. Susan Lawrence Ridgely Sedgwick, Portrait of Elizabeth ‘Mumbet’ Freeman (c.1742–1829). Watercolor on ivory, 1811. © Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA, USA/ The Bridgeman Art Library.
TWO WOMEN—one black, the other white—meet our gaze. The black woman is recessed into the picture plane, as though she has taken a step back, away from us. With a tilt of her chin, the white woman appears to project herself off of the ivory support and into our space. The painting of the black woman is finished and framed; her likeness has moved into the networks of affiliation that sustain and are sustained by portraiture. The painting of the white woman is unfinished. It never served as a surrogate for the sitter in its own time, although it does fulfill that purpose in ours. The paintings are conventional, immediately recognizable as miniature portraits painted in watercolor on thin sheets of ivory. In the first half of the nineteenth century, such likenesses were ubiquitous among affluent and middling Americans; today, they are ubiquitous at historical societies and museums, in antiques shops, and on eBay. Yet while the genre is familiar, these particular paintings are not. Portraits of nineteenth-century African-American women are rare, portraits on ivory all the more so. Unfinished miniature portraits from any period are also unusual. Yet these miniatures are set apart by more than the race of the sitter or the completion of the painting. Unlike the vast majority of extant ivory miniatures, they survive embedded in their stories, stories about the ties that bound sitters, artists, and viewers.
The painting of the African-American woman is a portrait of Elizabeth Freeman, a Massachusetts slave who claimed her liberty in 1781 (fig. 1). According to one story, after hearing the Declaration of Independence read aloud in a Sheffield church, she successfully sued for freedom in a case that challenged the constitutionality of slavery in Massachusetts. Freeman never learned to read or write. But even as a slave, she had been widely respected for her courage, integrity, and judgment. After gaining her freedom, she went to work in the household of Theodore Sedgwick, the attorney who had represented her. There, she was cook, housekeeper, nurse, and more. Sedgwick’s first wife, Pamela Dwight Sedgwick, was regularly incapacitated, physically and emotionally. Elizabeth Freeman stepped into the vacuum left by her mistress’s frailty and finally by her death in 1807. She left the Sedgwick household a year later, when Theodore remarried: according to Sedgwick family lore, Freeman balked at conceding her cherished authority to the new mistress. Instead, she retired to the small home she had purchased with her savings, worked as a nurse, and devoted herself to her grown child, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. But she never cut her ties to the Sedgwick family circle. Instead, she returned at regular intervals to care for the family when she was especially needed. Indeed, it may well have been one of these visits—part sociability, part support—that occasioned Freeman’s portrait, painted in 1811 by Susan Lawrence Ridley Sedgwick, the daughter-in-law of Freeman’s former attorney and employer. Elizabeth Freeman died in 1829. Despite her own fondness for fine dress and what one contemporary described as the “reckless consumption” of her kin, she left not “a single debt” to encumber an estate that amounted to nearly $1, 000.1
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The white woman portrayed in the second painting is Elizabeth (Betsey) Way Champlain, a miniaturist from New London, Connecticut. She began this self-portrait in 1818 (fig. 2). Champlain was born into a middling mercantile family just before the Revolution. It isn’t clear when or how she learned to paint, but by the time she was in her twenties, she had begun to paint miniature portraits of neighbors and kin. Her 1794 marriage to ship captain George Champlain did not bring her career to a halt. On the contrary. She continued to paint and teach throughout her marriage, perhaps to help stabilize the family’s erratic income. From her husband’s death in 1820 until her own, she lived mostly by her brush. Betsey Way Champlain worked diligently at her craft, learning when and where she could. Yet it would be a mistake to cast her merely as an earnest craftswoman, for she was an irrepressible culture vulture. She wrote sketches and especially poems on themes like “Viewing a Comet, ” “On Flattery, ” “The Muse, ” and “Fancy.” She associated herself with a coterie of very minor poets who circulated between New London and New York City. She played guitar and “flaggellett” and in her forties she took up dancing, mastering the “five positions” and waltzing her husband—and his cane—around their parlor. In 1825, Betsey Way Champlain died unexpectedly after a brief illness.2
And what of the paintings themselves? However different the sitters were from one another, their portraits confirm scholars’ conclusions about the cultural and social contexts of women’s artistic production on the one hand and the significance of portrait miniatures in the Early Republic. We know nothing about how, when, or why either Susan Ridley Sedgwick or Betsey Way Champlain learned to paint, much less how the women acquired the special skills necessary to paint in miniature on ivory. But it is doubtful that either received systematic training in the arts. That kind of instruction was notoriously hard to come by, even for aspiring male artists; indeed, its absence has become a set piece in art historical narratives. It therefore seems likely that both Sedgwick and Champlain were introduced to the rudiments of watercolor painting as part of their acquisition of the accomplishments that crowned elite and middling women’s education in the Early Republic. The overwhelming majority of female and coeducational academies and seminaries included some form of artistic training in their curricula; when they did not, private drawing and painting masters catering to young ladies and gentlemen stepped in to supply the need. One component of a broader concern with aesthetics, accomplishments were calculated to cultivate taste. The creation of an embroidered picture, a water-colored landscape, or a bouquet of worsted flowers suitable for display in the home was the training’s byproduct rather than its end.3 That said, advocates of the accomplishments also pointed out that the ornamental skills had market value; in a pinch, a woman could use her accomplishments for self-support. As one writer put it, the “fine arts or the sciences” that single women pursued for their “amusement or instruction” could become necessities depending on the “inactivity, folly, or death of a husband.”4
For Susan Ridley Sedgwick, daughter of one prosperous man and wife of another, painting remained an avocation, an accomplishment. As a girl, she had attended schools in Boston and Albany, where she met Catharine Maria Sedgwick and where she likely met her future husband, Theodore Sedgwick II, an attorney and Catharine’s older brother. Susan Ridley Sedgwick set enough store on art and on her own talent that she devoted time to mastering the painstaking technique demanded by a water-colored ivory miniature. She probably offered support, perhaps even instruction, to her daughter, Maria Banyer Sedgwick, another gifted amateur artist. But, like Betsey Champlain, Susan Ridley Sedgwick also enjoyed writing, a creative outlet and form of cultural production that offered distinct advantages over painting. For one thing, as a fledgling writer, Susan enjoyed the enthusiastic encouragement of her dear friend and sister-in-law, the renowned novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick. For another, a writer could produce (and sell) her work from the privacy of her own home, shrouded in decorous anonymity. Portrait painters by necessity ventured into the public to secure sitters. In the nineteenth century, it was far easier to be a scribbling woman than a painting one. Personal connections and public sentiment all but guaranteed that when Susan Ridley Sedgwick entered the cultural marketplace in the late 1820s, her aim was not to sell portraits but to publish didactic children’s literature.5
Wellesley Magazine Fall 2011 By Wellesley College Alumnae Association
Pushed by economic necessity and pulled by a love of art, Betsey Way Champlain turned her accomplishment into a saleable skill. This was no mean feat. Earning steady money as a female painter was far more difficult than promised by pundits touting the marketability of the accomplishments. In reality, it “required the greatest exertions to make both ends meet” as Champlain complained in 1822. More than once, she admitted that a “suppression of business” resulted in an “attack of hypochondriac.” Confronted by fluctuating demand and slim profits, Champlain displayed enormous energy, resilience, and ingenuity. She painted kin, neighbors, and local notables. In the 1810s, she expanded her business by taking likenesses of corpses. All told, she painted enough of New London that by the end of the nineteenth century her portraits of “ladies”—marked by a “delicacy of treatment and purity of sentiment”—had come to stand for the best of “old time” society. When portrait commissions were few and far between, she gave lessons to young women. But despite her eventual status as New London’s painter of record, Champlain deplored her spotty training, which consisted of poring over precepts included in letters from her sister, miniaturist Mary Way, and copying other paintings when
The white woman portrayed in the second painting is Elizabeth (Betsey) Way Champlain, a miniaturist from New London, Connecticut. She began this self-portrait in 1818 (fig. 2). Champlain was born into a middling mercantile family just before the Revolution. It isn’t clear when or how she learned to paint, but by the time she was in her twenties, she had begun to paint miniature portraits of neighbors and kin. Her 1794 marriage to ship captain George Champlain did not bring her career to a halt. On the contrary. She continued to paint and teach throughout her marriage, perhaps to help stabilize the family’s erratic income. From her husband’s death in 1820 until her own, she lived mostly by her brush. Betsey Way Champlain worked diligently at her craft, learning when and where she could. Yet it would be a mistake to cast her merely as an earnest craftswoman, for she was an irrepressible culture vulture. She wrote sketches and especially poems on themes like “Viewing a Comet, ” “On Flattery, ” “The Muse, ” and “Fancy.” She associated herself with a coterie of very minor poets who circulated between New London and New York City. She played guitar and “flaggellett” and in her forties she took up dancing, mastering the “five positions” and waltzing her husband—and his cane—around their parlor. In 1825, Betsey Way Champlain died unexpectedly after a brief illness.2
And what of the paintings themselves? However different the sitters were from one another, their portraits confirm scholars’ conclusions about the cultural and social contexts of women’s artistic production on the one hand and the significance of portrait miniatures in the Early Republic. We know nothing about how, when, or why either Susan Ridley Sedgwick or Betsey Way Champlain learned to paint, much less how the women acquired the special skills necessary to paint in miniature on ivory. But it is doubtful that either received systematic training in the arts. That kind of instruction was notoriously hard to come by, even for aspiring male artists; indeed, its absence has become a set piece in art historical narratives. It therefore seems likely that both Sedgwick and Champlain were introduced to the rudiments of watercolor painting as part of their acquisition of the accomplishments that crowned elite and middling women’s education in the Early Republic. The overwhelming majority of female and coeducational academies and seminaries included some form of artistic training in their curricula; when they did not, private drawing and painting masters catering to young ladies and gentlemen stepped in to supply the need. One component of a broader concern with aesthetics, accomplishments were calculated to cultivate taste. The creation of an embroidered picture, a water-colored landscape, or a bouquet of worsted flowers suitable for display in the home was the training’s byproduct rather than its end.3 That said, advocates of the accomplishments also pointed out that the ornamental skills had market value; in a pinch, a woman could use her accomplishments for self-support. As one writer put it, the “fine arts or the sciences” that single women pursued for their “amusement or instruction” could become necessities depending on the “inactivity, folly, or death of a husband.”4
For Susan Ridley Sedgwick, daughter of one prosperous man and wife of another, painting remained an avocation, an accomplishment. As a girl, she had attended schools in Boston and Albany, where she met Catharine Maria Sedgwick and where she likely met her future husband, Theodore Sedgwick II, an attorney and Catharine’s older brother. Susan Ridley Sedgwick set enough store on art and on her own talent that she devoted time to mastering the painstaking technique demanded by a water-colored ivory miniature. She probably offered support, perhaps even instruction, to her daughter, Maria Banyer Sedgwick, another gifted amateur artist. But, like Betsey Champlain, Susan Ridley Sedgwick also enjoyed writing, a creative outlet and form of cultural production that offered distinct advantages over painting. For one thing, as a fledgling writer, Susan enjoyed the enthusiastic encouragement of her dear friend and sister-in-law, the renowned novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick. For another, a writer could produce (and sell) her work from the privacy of her own home, shrouded in decorous anonymity. Portrait painters by necessity ventured into the public to secure sitters. In the nineteenth century, it was far easier to be a scribbling woman than a painting one. Personal connections and public sentiment all but guaranteed that when Susan Ridley Sedgwick entered the cultural marketplace in the late 1820s, her aim was not to sell portraits but to publish didactic children’s literature.5
Wellesley Magazine Fall 2011 By Wellesley College Alumnae Association
Pushed by economic necessity and pulled by a love of art, Betsey Way Champlain turned her accomplishment into a saleable skill. This was no mean feat. Earning steady money as a female painter was far more difficult than promised by pundits touting the marketability of the accomplishments. In reality, it “required the greatest exertions to make both ends meet” as Champlain complained in 1822. More than once, she admitted that a “suppression of business” resulted in an “attack of hypochondriac.” Confronted by fluctuating demand and slim profits, Champlain displayed enormous energy, resilience, and ingenuity. She painted kin, neighbors, and local notables. In the 1810s, she expanded her business by taking likenesses of corpses. All told, she painted enough of New London that by the end of the nineteenth century her portraits of “ladies”—marked by a “delicacy of treatment and purity of sentiment”—had come to stand for the best of “old time” society. When portrait commissions were few and far between, she gave lessons to young women. But despite her eventual status as New London’s painter of record, Champlain deplored her spotty training, which consisted of poring over precepts included in letters from her sister, miniaturist Mary Way, and copying other paintings when
The white woman portrayed in the second painting is Elizabeth (Betsey) Way Champlain, a miniaturist from New London, Connecticut. She began this self-portrait in 1818 (fig. 2). Champlain was born into a middling mercantile family just before the Revolution. It isn’t clear when or how she learned to paint, but by the time she was in her twenties, she had begun to paint miniature portraits of neighbors and kin. Her 1794 marriage to ship captain George Champlain did not bring her career to a halt. On the contrary. She continued to paint and teach throughout her marriage, perhaps to help stabilize the family’s erratic income. From her husband’s death in 1820 until her own, she lived mostly by her brush. Betsey Way Champlain worked diligently at her craft, learning when and where she could. Yet it would be a mistake to cast her merely as an earnest craftswoman, for she was an irrepressible culture vulture. She wrote sketches and especially poems on themes like “Viewing a Comet, ” “On Flattery, ” “The Muse, ” and “Fancy.” She associated herself with a coterie of very minor poets who circulated between New London and New York City. She played guitar and “flaggellett” and in her forties she took up dancing, mastering the “five positions” and waltzing her husband—and his cane—around their parlor. In 1825, Betsey Way Champlain died unexpectedly after a brief illness.2
And what of the paintings themselves? However different the sitters were from one another, their portraits confirm scholars’ conclusions about the cultural and social contexts of women’s artistic production on the one hand and the significance of portrait miniatures in the Early Republic. We know nothing about how, when, or why either Susan Ridley Sedgwick or Betsey Way Champlain learned to paint, much less how the women acquired the special skills necessary to paint in miniature on ivory. But it is doubtful that either received systematic training in the arts. That kind of instruction was notoriously hard to come by, even for aspiring male artists; indeed, its absence has become a set piece in art historical narratives. It therefore seems likely that both Sedgwick and Champlain were introduced to the rudiments of watercolor painting as part of their acquisition of the accomplishments that crowned elite and middling women’s education in the Early Republic. The overwhelming majority of female and coeducational academies and seminaries included some form of artistic training in their curricula; when they did not, private drawing and painting masters catering to young ladies and gentlemen stepped in to supply the need. One component of a broader concern with aesthetics, accomplishments were calculated to cultivate taste. The creation of an embroidered picture, a water-colored landscape, or a bouquet of worsted flowers suitable for display in the home was the training’s byproduct rather than its end.3 That said, advocates of the accomplishments also pointed out that the ornamental skills had market value; in a pinch, a woman could use her accomplishments for self-support. As one writer put it, the “fine arts or the sciences” that single women pursued for their “amusement or instruction” could become necessities depending on the “inactivity, folly, or death of a husband.”4
For Susan Ridley Sedgwick, daughter of one prosperous man and wife of another, painting remained an avocation, an accomplishment. As a girl, she had attended schools in Boston and Albany, where she met Catharine Maria Sedgwick and where she likely met her future husband, Theodore Sedgwick II, an attorney and Catharine’s older brother. Susan Ridley Sedgwick set enough store on art and on her own talent that she devoted time to mastering the painstaking technique demanded by a water-colored ivory miniature. She probably offered support, perhaps even instruction, to her daughter, Maria Banyer Sedgwick, another gifted amateur artist. But, like Betsey Champlain, Susan Ridley Sedgwick also enjoyed writing, a creative outlet and form of cultural production that offered distinct advantages over painting. For one thing, as a fledgling writer, Susan enjoyed the enthusiastic encouragement of her dear friend and sister-in-law, the renowned novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick. For another, a writer could produce (and sell) her work from the privacy of her own home, shrouded in decorous anonymity. Portrait painters by necessity ventured into the public to secure sitters. In the nineteenth century, it was far easier to be a scribbling woman than a painting one. Personal connections and public sentiment all but guaranteed that when Susan Ridley Sedgwick entered the cultural marketplace in the late 1820s, her aim was not to sell portraits but to publish didactic children’s literature.5
Wellesley Magazine Fall 2011 By Wellesley College Alumnae Association
Pushed by economic necessity and pulled by a love of art, Betsey Way Champlain turned her accomplishment into a saleable skill. This was no mean feat. Earning steady money as a female painter was far more difficult than promised by pundits touting the marketability of the accomplishments. In reality, it “required the greatest exertions to make both ends meet” as Champlain complained in 1822. More than once, she admitted that a “suppression of business” resulted in an “attack of hypochondriac.” Confronted by fluctuating demand and slim profits, Champlain displayed enormous energy, resilience, and ingenuity. She painted kin, neighbors, and local notables. In the 1810s, she expanded her business by taking likenesses of corpses. All told, she painted enough of New London that by the end of the nineteenth century her portraits of “ladies”—marked by a “delicacy of treatment and purity of sentiment”—had come to stand for the best of “old time” society. When portrait commissions were few and far between, she gave lessons to young women. But despite her eventual status as New London’s painter of record, Champlain deplored her spotty training, which consisted of poring over precepts included in letters from her sister, miniaturist Mary Way, and copying other paintings when
