The Salem Orientalist Society
Saturday, May 27, 2006
There's got to be a moral behind all this...
Last semester, I took a course from Elizabeth Johns (I'm sure you know her Eakins and Homer books), who was interested in exploring the alleged divide between the museum and the academy. I thought a compelling project, in that respect, might be to investigate the completely context-free display of "American Naive Painting" at the National Gallery, which I felt I could align politically with the values of early folk-art collectors and other proponents of native modernism in the first part of the twentieth century. Of the works on display, the best bet seemed to be this painting:
It's by an artist named William Matthew Prior, done in 1850, and titled (by the Gallery), Little Miss Fairfield. An inscription on the back shows that it was done for a Fairfield, Esq., in Boston. Prior is the most famous example of artists who charged less for rough paintings, like this one. He was a fairly decent portraitist in a more academic style, and his copies on glass of Stuart's portrait of Washington were well known in his lifetime.
Further study had me realizing that the discussion of the cheapness of these portraits belies the fact that photographs were actually considerably cheaper by this time, and far more common. In fact, there were a number of Daguerreotypists advertising images for between twenty-five and fifty cents all along the East Coast by 1850. Why, then, would anyone choose this sort of sketchy painting for around five dollars over the cheap and unimpeachable verisimilitude of a photograph? There were certain circumstances in which poor illusion was favored over exacting realism. Little Miss Fairfield was dead when the painting was completed, and her parents likely could not afford a higher quality painting, but wanted an image that pictured their child as alive, so they opted for a mid-range choice and commissioned Prior to paint this work.
This hypothesis initially occurred to me while doing a little preliminary study of contemporary photographs of children, when I realized that a significant proportion on the images I came across were produced posthumously (hence the trouble with the post on this blog which has since been removed). As soon as I began researching the conventions of memorial paintings, it became obvious that Miss Fairfield fit the genre. Some of the potential emblems of death are ambiguous: while black, white, or red were colors appropriate for mourning, and dead children were frequently depicted with favorite toys, the rabbit she holds and crimson outfit she wears could just as likely have been the accoutrements of a living child going to a portrait studio. The two dead branches, prominently featured in front of the vegetation on either side, and the pink-tinged clouds of a setting sun, however, are among the symbols most frequently employed to indicate that the individual depicted was no longer living.
Some have estimated that as many as seventy-five percent of the portraits of children produced in the first half of the nineteenth century were completed after a child's death. Parents eagerly took their last opportunity to have an image produced by which to remember their departed son or daughter, and a photographer in the early 1850s advised in his newspaper advertisement that "now is the time to secure the shadow ere the substance fade..." Even if they couldn't afford anything more than a photograph, Parents who weren't lucky enough to have heeded his advice tried their best to procure images that would make the dead child seem as lively as possible - infants were usually pictured as if they were merely asleep, and older children sometimes had eyes painted on top of their closed lids on the developed photograph; photographers might also take pictures after propping the deceased's eyes open, or even posing them with stays (or the helping hand of a relative) so that they appeared to be sitting up under their own power.
As those of you who know me at all well have doubtless already guessed, this project quickly became excruciatingly troubling. After glimpsing just a few photographs, I found myself going through books by squinting my eyes as I turned every page, then quickly covering any illustrations with index cards before letting my eyes focus and reading the text. It was too late, though, 'cause once you've seen something searing, there's no un-seeing it. For a couple weeks there, every time I would turn out my lights, there was one particular photo that I couldn't help but see... Notice how Miss Fairfield's eyes are sort of weirdly wide-open?
It's by an artist named William Matthew Prior, done in 1850, and titled (by the Gallery), Little Miss Fairfield. An inscription on the back shows that it was done for a Fairfield, Esq., in Boston. Prior is the most famous example of artists who charged less for rough paintings, like this one. He was a fairly decent portraitist in a more academic style, and his copies on glass of Stuart's portrait of Washington were well known in his lifetime.
Further study had me realizing that the discussion of the cheapness of these portraits belies the fact that photographs were actually considerably cheaper by this time, and far more common. In fact, there were a number of Daguerreotypists advertising images for between twenty-five and fifty cents all along the East Coast by 1850. Why, then, would anyone choose this sort of sketchy painting for around five dollars over the cheap and unimpeachable verisimilitude of a photograph? There were certain circumstances in which poor illusion was favored over exacting realism. Little Miss Fairfield was dead when the painting was completed, and her parents likely could not afford a higher quality painting, but wanted an image that pictured their child as alive, so they opted for a mid-range choice and commissioned Prior to paint this work.
This hypothesis initially occurred to me while doing a little preliminary study of contemporary photographs of children, when I realized that a significant proportion on the images I came across were produced posthumously (hence the trouble with the post on this blog which has since been removed). As soon as I began researching the conventions of memorial paintings, it became obvious that Miss Fairfield fit the genre. Some of the potential emblems of death are ambiguous: while black, white, or red were colors appropriate for mourning, and dead children were frequently depicted with favorite toys, the rabbit she holds and crimson outfit she wears could just as likely have been the accoutrements of a living child going to a portrait studio. The two dead branches, prominently featured in front of the vegetation on either side, and the pink-tinged clouds of a setting sun, however, are among the symbols most frequently employed to indicate that the individual depicted was no longer living.
Some have estimated that as many as seventy-five percent of the portraits of children produced in the first half of the nineteenth century were completed after a child's death. Parents eagerly took their last opportunity to have an image produced by which to remember their departed son or daughter, and a photographer in the early 1850s advised in his newspaper advertisement that "now is the time to secure the shadow ere the substance fade..." Even if they couldn't afford anything more than a photograph, Parents who weren't lucky enough to have heeded his advice tried their best to procure images that would make the dead child seem as lively as possible - infants were usually pictured as if they were merely asleep, and older children sometimes had eyes painted on top of their closed lids on the developed photograph; photographers might also take pictures after propping the deceased's eyes open, or even posing them with stays (or the helping hand of a relative) so that they appeared to be sitting up under their own power.
As those of you who know me at all well have doubtless already guessed, this project quickly became excruciatingly troubling. After glimpsing just a few photographs, I found myself going through books by squinting my eyes as I turned every page, then quickly covering any illustrations with index cards before letting my eyes focus and reading the text. It was too late, though, 'cause once you've seen something searing, there's no un-seeing it. For a couple weeks there, every time I would turn out my lights, there was one particular photo that I couldn't help but see... Notice how Miss Fairfield's eyes are sort of weirdly wide-open?
