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“The Human Heart by Which We Live”: Family Portraits from Cradle to Grave
Robin Jaffee Frank
Description: Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk...
Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art
~Portraiture, the dominant form of painting in nineteenth-century America, offered a sense of not only how the subjects actually looked but also how they wanted to be seen by their peers and remembered by posterity. Affluent sitters, and increasingly members of the middling classes, commissioned portraits as an expression of social position and material aspirations....
Author
Robin Jaffee Frank
PublisherYale University Press
Copyright© 2020 The Huntington Library, Art
Museum, and Botanical Gardens
Related print edition pages: pp.171-207
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00280.008
Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22048
Chapter subject tags:Folk artPortrait painting, AmericanChildren--PortraitsFamily records
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“The Human Heart by Which We Live”: Family Portraits from Cradle to Grave
ROBIN JAFFEE FRANK
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Description: Girl with Flowers by Hopkins, Milton W.
MILTON W. HOPKINS (1789–1844; ACTIVE IN NEW YORK STATE; RICHMOND, VIRGINIA; AND OHIO)
Girl with Flowers
Early to mid-nineteenth century
Probably New York State
Oil on canvas
Framed: 43½ × 29½ in.
2016.25.112
Portraiture, the dominant form of painting in nineteenth-century America, offered a sense of not only how the subjects actually looked but also how they wanted to be seen by their peers and remembered by posterity. Affluent sitters, and increasingly members of the middling classes, commissioned portraits as an expression of social position and material aspirations. Portraits also served as a visual record of family members during a period when mortality rates were high. Beyond conveying status, they embodied the yearning to capture likenesses of loved ones who might die young, and to keep those who did within the circle of the living. These memorial and sentimental functions of early American portraiture are the primary concern of this essay.
~
Description: Boy with a Book and A Flute
Boy with a Book and a Flute, ca. 1830
Watercolor and gouache on paper
13¾ × 11½ in.
2016.25.99
Drawn from the Fielding Collection, the portraits discussed here explore family ties, especially maternal bonds of affection. John Brewster Jr. portrays a married couple in the midst of their eighth pregnancy; Joseph H. Davis, parents at home with their youngest infant; and Samuel S. Miller, a deceased child pictured as healthy. Together, these artists create a vivid portrait of a young nation by imbuing their compositions with details personal to the sitters yet resonant with the era’s attitudes about family life from cradle to grave.
“DUTY AND HAPPINESS”
John Brewster Jr.'s Paired Portraits of Expectant Parents
An evocative portrayal of a long-married couple at the dawn of the nineteenth century, John Brewster Jr.’s paired portraits likely depict Major David Coffin (1763–1838) and his pregnant wife, Elizabeth Stone Coffin (1767–1811).1Huntington Art Museum, object file for L2015.41.164. See Jeanne-Marie Zebrowski, “Just Plain Folk,” Maine Antique Digest, January 1981, 22A; Marguerite Riordan, advertisement, The Magazine Antiques, November 1992, 626–27; The Collection of Susan and Mark Laracy: Distinguished American Furniture and Folk Art (New York: Sotheby’s, 2007), lot 174. In the lot description, Paul S. D’Ambrosio identifies the sitters and dates the portraits to June 1801: “These portraits are the earliest documented portraits of Brewster’s extended 1801 sojourn in Newburyport, which suggests that the Coffins played a role in bringing the artist to the town. Brewster’s nine documented 1801 Newburyport portraits include: this pair, executed in June; portraits of Captain and Mrs. William Wise, painted in August; and five well-known portraits of the James Prince family painted in November.” The portraits of Captain and Mrs. William Wise are in a private collection; James Prince and Son William Henry, James Prince, Jr., and Benjamin Prince are in the collection of the Historical Society of Old Newbury. Portrait of Sarah Prince (also known as Silver Moon or Girl at the Pianoforte) is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. It must be noted, however, that two William Jennys portraits from 1807 that are allegedly of Major David Coffin and Elizabeth Stone Coffin, now in the collection of the Smith College Museum of Art (SC 1995:2-1 and 1995:2-2), do not resemble the couple portrayed by Brewster, now in the Fielding Collection. Born in Hampton, Connecticut, Brewster was the son of a prominent physician and a direct descendant of Mayflower pilgrim William Brewster. Although deaf and mute, the artist became a leading itinerant portraitist of the region’s elite merchant class through his prodigious talent and family social connections.2On Brewster, see especially Nina Fletcher Little, John Brewster, Jr., 1766–1854: Deaf-Mute Painter of Connecticut and Maine (Hartford, Conn.: Connecticut Historical Society, 1960); Harlan Lane, A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster, Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); and Paul S. D’Ambrosio, The World of John Brewster, Jr., 1766–1854, exh. cat. (Cooperstown, N.Y.: Fenimore Art Museum, 2006). He possessed the ability to communicate through both writing and a rudimentary sign language, before its standardization, but also made his voice heard through art.
~
Description: Portraits of Elizabeth Stone Coffin and Major David Coffin by Brewster, John, Jr.
JOHN BREWSTER JR. (1766–1854)
Portraits of Elizabeth Stone Coffin and Major David Coffin, 1801
Newburyport, Massachusetts
Oil on canvas
Each: 33¾ × 26¾ in.
L2015.41.164, .165
~
Description: Portrait of Elizabeth Stone Coffin, detail by Brewster, John, Jr.
JOHN BREWSTER JR.
Portrait of Elizabeth Stone Coffin (detail)
In 1796, Brewster settled in his brother Royal’s home in Buxton, Maine, and traveled from there to fulfill commissions across New England. During 1801–2, he lodged with the affluent family of James Prince in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where he probably painted the portraits of David and Elizabeth Coffin. Family ties facilitated the connection between the sitters and the artist: David Coffin was the nephew of Paul Coffin, the minister of the Church of Christ in Buxton; his daughter Dorcas had married Royal Brewster in 1795.
In Brewster’s time, Harvard-educated Congregational ministers like Reverend Coffin transmitted a vision of American society as a well-ordered patriarchal hierarchy. The Coffins’ paired portraits reflect this gendered worldview. Women were subordinated legally to men, but they did hold power in the home, where they were responsible for the family’s legacy through their role as mothers.
The two canvases lend equal size and visual importance to husband and wife, who are nonetheless differentiated by gender-specific attributes and gestures that reflect contemporary assumptions about their separate spheres. The merchandise in David’s portrait indicates his attainments in business; the prayer book and locket in Elizabeth’s portrait, her role as guardian of morality and fount of affection. The deaf artist has translated his sensitivity to nuances of gesture and gaze—vital means of communication for him—into the language of paint with quiet eloquence. David’s hand-in-waistcoat pose identifies him as a well-mannered gentleman;3Arline Meyer, “Re-dressing Classical Statuary: The Eighteenth-Century Hand-in-Waistcoat Portrait,” Art Bulletin 77 (March 1995): 45–63. the position of Elizabeth’s hand resting on her belly suggests pregnancy. Both sitters regard the artist and viewer with calm solemnity.
Before reliable contraception and modern medicine, a large family would have seemed inevitable, and well-founded fears of death in childbirth filled diaries and letters.4On childbirth anxieties expressed in letters and diaries, see Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, At Home: The American Family 1750–1870 (New York: Abrams, 1989), 227–31. David Coffin had married Elizabeth Stone on February 9, 1786. Thirteen weeks later, their son Nathaniel was born. Premarital sex between engaged couples was common, revealing that the boundaries of conduct at the turn of the nineteenth century were not as narrow as we might believe.5For premarital pregnancy rates in New England, see Gloria L. Main, “Rocking the Cradle: Downsizing the New England Family,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 35–58, esp. 45, fig. 5. By the time Elizabeth sat for Brewster’s portrait, she was carrying her eighth baby. Ebenezer Stone Coffin, born on October 11, 1801, would grow up to become a shipmaster, inventor of improved steering wheels, and manufacturer of shipping materials. The couple ultimately had twelve children.6Some sources state either ten or eleven children; however, an examination of various records reveals that David and Elizabeth had twelve children, including two sons, Richard Pike and John Stone, who did not live to adulthood: Nathaniel (1787–1833), David (1788–1815), Mary (1790–1864), Richard Pike (1792–1793), Richard Pike or Richard Pitt (1794–1844), George (1797–1865), Isaac Stone (1798–1855), Ebenezer Stone (1801–1870), Elizabeth (1803–1858), Sarah Miller (1805–1836), John Stone (1807–1807), and Frances Boyd (1810–1881). The following genealogical sources were consulted: W. S. Appleton, Coffin Gatherings: Five Generations of Descendants of Tristram Coffin of Newbury and Nantucket (Boston: David Clapp and Son, 1896), 34; Louis Coffin, The Coffin Family, introduction by Will Gardner (1884; reprint, Nantucket, Mass.: Nantucket Historical Association, 1962), 155; Massachusetts Vital Records, 1620–1988, Ancestry.com; Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620–1988, Ancestry.com; Massachusetts, Marriage Records, 1840–1915, Ancestry.com; Massachusetts Death Records, 1841–1915, Ancestry.com; North America, Family Histories, 1500–2000, Ancestry.com; New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston; FindaGrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/, database and images: “Maj David Coffin,” 101757406; “Richard Pitt Coffin,” 101757407; “Richard Pike Coffin,” 85727348; “Sarah Coffin Miller Stevens,” 101758763; “Ancestors of ACB [Anna Coffin Benedict],” http://rgm3.net, entry 56; Town and Vital Records of Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts to the Year 1849 (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1911). Two of them died in infancy: Richard Pike at age one, in 1793; John Stone, the day he was born, in 1807.7Richard Pike’s life dates are July 1, 1792–October 24, 1793. See previous note. In Elizabeth’s portrait, her fashionable dress conceals her condition because the popular high-waisted style was well suited to both pregnancy and breastfeeding. The voluminous fabric characteristic of the period accommodated her body as her belly grew; once the baby arrived, crisscrossed removable bibs at the bustline permitted breastfeeding.8On the connection between the high-waisted style and maternity, see Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Williamsburg, Va., and New Haven, Conn.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in association with Yale University Press, 2002), 152; and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic, exh. cat. (Hartford and New Haven, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum and Yale University Press, 1991), 220. On removable bibs, see Ann Buermann Wass and Michelle Webb Fandrich, Clothing through American History: The Federal Era through Antebellum, 1786–1860 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood, 2010), 108.
Whereas childbearing and child-rearing dominated Elizabeth’s life, business dominated her husband’s. In the portrait of David Coffin, Brewster’s spare still life of horizontal and vertical bands of flat color reveal his ability to find beauty in abstractly arranged objects executed with an economy of detail. An entrepreneurial shipmaster, investor, and owner of approximately fifty ships, David Coffin stocked his store with merchandise from his own cargoes.9Frances Geisewite Reiland, Footprints in History: Bradstreet, Brocklebank, Coffin, Dudley, Greenleaf, Johnson, Pierce, and Richardson Families in America (Newburyport, Mass.: Museum of Old Newbury, 2015), 74–77. For this reference, and for responding to my numerous inquiries and generously sharing research on the history of the Coffin family and Newburyport, I am enormously grateful to the Newburyport Public Library Archival Center. I especially and warmly thank Sharon Spieldenner, senior librarian/ archivist, as well as Dana Echelberger, staff librarian/ assistant archivist, and their research volunteers: Linda Tulley, Bob Richard, Carrie Poirier, and Sue Connell. I also thank Susan Edwards, executive director, and Emily Lawrence, assistant director, Museum of Old Newbury. The decanter might have contained spirits from Coffin’s Distillery. On the shelves above, the bolts of fabric resonate with the European and Caribbean textiles the sitter advertised, among them “Coloured Cotton Cambrick,” “Blue Broadcloth,” and “fresh linens.” Spools of “coloured Threads” punctuate the neutral environment. In Elizabeth’s portrait, “White edgings” adorn her clothing.10For the distillery, see Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette, April 18, 1800, 4; for other goods, see September 27, 1799; April 8, 11, 15, and 25, 1800; May 16, 1800; and May 7, 1802.
In addition to communicating her role as mother and his as entrepreneur, Brewster’s props honor the Coffins’ marital intimacy. Interpreted in the context of a long history of secret letters and lockets in literature and art, the letter David tantalizingly holds toward the viewer and the locket Elizabeth wears contain hidden secrets. David appears to have just broken the sealing wax, verifying that the letter has remained unopened until now. Is it from Elizabeth? Does it convey private feelings, or mere commercial information? The locket so decisively pinned over Elizabeth’s heart and breast declares its centrality in her affections. At the time, lockets frequently enshrined portrait miniatures painted in watercolor on ivory. Brewster, who painted miniatures, might have made small images of David and Elizabeth at the same time he painted their larger likenesses. They would serve as surrogates while David was away at sea—not unlike the small portraits in the Fielding Collection of a sea captain and his wife. Men often carried tiny framed portraits of their loved ones tucked in a vest pocket or as a pendant hidden under an intricately knotted cravat. Women publicly displayed on their bodies the family’s wealth and affections in one potent symbol, the miniature. In many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century oil paintings, the sitter excludes the viewer from her inner circle by showing only the portrait miniature’s covering case, as Elizabeth does here. We yearn to be invited to hold the locket, but its size and placement demand that it be viewed and exchanged in a way that excludes us.11On full-scale portraits of women wearing miniatures, see Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 2000), 21–35.
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Description: Portrait Miniatures of a Sea Captain and His Wife
Portrait Miniatures of a Sea Captain and His Wife
Early nineteenth century
Watercolor on paper
Each: 5 × 3⅞ in.
L2015.41.142.1, .2
The view over Elizabeth’s shoulder also intrigues us by suggesting hidden meanings. Since the Renaissance, Western portraitists have frequently depicted sitters posed near large windows affording pleasurable prospects. Brewster not only continued this tradition in Elizabeth’s portrait but also lavished exceptional attention on the enigmatic vista. He likely borrowed elements from actual structures and invented others. A devastating fire in Newburyport in 1811 hampers identification of buildings that had stood in 1801. Notwithstanding, Brewster’s pleasing arrangement of large buildings speaks of prosperity—as do the densely packed white-clapboard buildings in a Newburyport townscape dated 1774. The tall spires, representing three churches, proclaim the town’s piety.12At left is the North Church, Central Congregational, with the fish weather vane and three-pronged trident, on Titcomb Street; in the middle, the Religious Society, rebuilt on Pleasant Street in 1801; at right, the Old South Church, First Presbyterian, with a weathercock. Identifications courtesy of Sharon Spieldenner, Newburyport Public Library Archival Center. In Elizabeth’s portrait, a garden folly, crowned with a white spire, soars above the landscape, much like Newburyport’s churches. Brewster visually links the church-like structure with the sitter through their shared pyramidal shape and palette: the terrace’s alternating tiers echo the folds of her dress; the white circling fences, the white lace circling her sleeves; the white tower’s translucent windows, her translucent white fichu. The visual association accords with the era’s elevated view of mothers as guardians of spirituality in the domestic sphere.
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Description: A North-east View of the Town & harbour of NewburyPort by S.W. Chandler &...
S. W. CHANDLER & BRO. LITHOGRAPHERS, BOSTON, AFTER A DRAWING BY BEN. JOHNSON
A North-east View of the Town & harbour of NewburyPort, 1774
Reproduced in John J. Currier, History of Newburyport, vol. 1 (Newburyport, Mass: Published by the author, 1906), 80.
During the early American republic, mothers were urged to sacrifice their own desires, comfort, and even health to ensure the growth and success of the new nation by bearing and raising many virtuous citizens.13On “republican motherhood,” see Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective,” in Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays by Linda K. Kerber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 41–62. Six years after Brewster painted the portraits of David and Elizabeth Coffin, their youngest child, Frances Boyd, arrived on Christmas Day in 1810. Only six weeks later, Elizabeth passed away after a “short illness.” Mothers often suffered lingering complications in the weeks after giving birth. In harmony with Brewster’s characterization, Elizabeth’s obituary praised her “high veneration for religion: Influenced by its dictates, she has ever found duty and happiness in a diligent attention to the concerns of a beloved and numerous family; to promote their present and future happiness.”14Elizabeth died on February 6, 1811; Newport Herald, February 8, 1811, 3. My thanks to Elee Wood. In the tumultuous years that followed, the sea claimed two sons: David drowned near Boston in 1815; Nathaniel died at Port-de-Paix, Haiti, in 1833. Daughter Sarah died in 1836.15Reiland, Footprints in History, 74–77; Coffin, Coffin Family, 155; “Ancestors of ACB,” entry 56; “Sarah Coffin Miller Stevens,” FindaGrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/101758763/sarah-coffin-stevens. Two years later, Major David Coffin died. His epitaph proclaims his faith: “Through all the changing scenes of life / In trouble and in joy: / The praises of my God shall still / My heart and tongue employ.”16Reiland, Footprints in History, 74–77; Coffin, Coffin Family, 155; “Ancestors of ACB,” entry 56; “Maj David Coffin,” FindaGrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/101757406/david-coffin.
“HATH ANY BEING ON EARTH, A CHARGE MORE FEARFULLY IMPORTANT, THAN THAT OF THE MOTHER?”
Joseph H. Davis's Portrait of a Family
Much like Brewster’s portraits of the Coffins, Joseph H. Davis’s small watercolor depicting Charles and Comfort Caverly with their baby, Isaac, illuminates social assumptions about American family life over three decades later. While Elizabeth Coffin protectively places her hand over her pregnant belly, Comfort Caverly holds her son tenderly, yet securely, in her lap. As opposed to showing husband and wife in separate drawings, in their distinct commercial and domestic domains, Davis unites the family members on a single sheet of paper, positioning them at home, seated around a table.
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Description: Family Portrait of Charles and Comfort Caverly and Their Son Isaac by Davis, Joseph...
JOSEPH H. DAVIS (1811–1865)
Family Portrait of Charles and Comfort Caverly and Their Son Isaac, 1836
Caverly’s Hill, New Hampshire
Watercolor, pen, and ink
Framed: 12½ × 17 in.
L2015.41.144
But the gender divisions persist. Charles reads the Dover-Gazette and— as the quill pens with inkwell and his notes on the paper attest—responds to the news, demonstrating engagement with the outside world nearly a century before women won the right to vote. His top hat rests on the table, suggesting that he has recently returned home. The family Bible and psalm book, placed in front of Comfort, define her spiritual role at home. Davis directs our attention to Isaac by outlining his profile in pencil and leaving the cream wove paper untouched to represent his pale skin illumined against his mother’s dark dress. The nearby apple, a common emblem of fertility, and the baby on her lap celebrate motherhood.
As the nineteenth century advanced, mothers’ duty to protect their children’s bodies, characters, and souls—and by extension the nation itself—became codified as the “cult of domesticity,” with its emphasis on piety and purity.17Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, pt. 1 (1966): 151–74. Social commentators like Catharine Beecher and Lydia Sigourney encouraged intense bonding within the nuclear family to link generations together through maternal love rather than patriarchal authority. In an increasingly commercial society, mother and child served as signs of stability and comfort—the name of the sitter—in contrast to the hostile world outside.
Here, Davis has used brilliant white outlined in red to illuminate the family Bible, psalm book, and Isaac’s heart-festooned gown—visually associating the Word of God with the blessed child. Children were seen as being in an ideal state, free of sin, close to God, in stark opposition to the older doctrine of infant depravity based on Scripture. “But trailing clouds of glory do we come / From God, who is our home: / Heaven lies about us in our infancy!” popular poet William Wordsworth exclaimed.18William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. A. J. George (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 354, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001428231; first published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. The pervasive elevation of the mother-and-child bond found expression in paintings, prints, fiction, and poetry extolling maternal devotion. A proliferation of sermons and popular child-rearing magazines promoted the education of women in the belief that they should devote themselves with near-religious fervor to preserving the godliness of their children. By the 1830s, mother and child had ascended to the throne of domestic virtue. In Letters to Mothers of 1838, Sigourney preached: “You are sitting with your child in your arms. So am I. . . . Ah! How much have we to learn, that we may bring this beautiful and mysterious creature, to the light of knowledge, to the perfect bliss of immortality! Hath any being on earth, a charge more fearfully important, than that of the Mother?”19Lydia Howard Sigourney, Letters to Mothers (Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Skinner, 1838), vii, viii.
Like David and Elizabeth Coffin decades earlier, Charles and Comfort Caverly still lived in an era when parents had reason to fear that their offspring might not live to adulthood. Similar to Elizabeth, Comfort was pregnant when she wed; her first child, Eliza Jane, was born on November 1, 1812. Sadly, Eliza died on March 3, 1826, at age thirteen and a half. Only “E. J.” appears on her gravestone at Caverly Cemetery.20“Eliza Jane ‘Ej’ Caverly,” FindaGrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/162572627/eliza-jane-caverly. Conflicting historical records make it difficult to know for certain whether the couple had more daughters, with one source listing Lavinia D and no life dates, and another recording Eliza Jane (1834–1866).21Robert B. Caverly, Genealogy of the Caverly Family, from the Year 1116 to the Year 1880, Made Profitable and Exemplified by Many a Lesson of Life (Lowell, Mass.: George M. Elliott, 1880), 61, New Hampshire Historical Society; and Ancestry.com, which includes dates for Eliza Jane but does not record Lavinia. Life dates gleaned from both sources. Typically, the life dates of unmarried females are difficult to confirm, given the restrictions on their legal and economic rights. Comfort safely delivered four boys—Joseph, Leonard, Charles, and Cyrus—between 1815 and 1825. The youngest, Isaac, held on Comfort’s lap in Davis’s watercolor, was born a full decade after the couple lost their firstborn.
Davis’s vignettes of family groups like the Caverlys, presented in profile, convey a generalized ideal of family life in the rural areas of New Hampshire and Maine that this itinerant artist roamed in the years 1832 to 1838. He often received commissions from members of the same extended family, including the Caverlys.22See Esther Sparks, “Joseph H. Davis,” in American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, ed. Jean Lipman and Tom Armstrong, exh. cat. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1980), 66–69; and Arthur and Sybil Kern, “Joseph H. Davis: Identity Established,” The Clarion, Summer 1989, 46–65, https://issuu.com/american_folk_art_museum/docs/clarion_14_3_sum1989. Also see Robin Jaffee Frank, “Portraits of Children,” in Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence: Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana, vol. 1, ed. Jane Katcher, David A. Schorsch, and Ruth Wolfe (Yale University Press in association with Marquand Books, 2006), 104–21. With a strong sense of flat pattern typical of nonacademically trained artists, Davis painted watercolors that share similarities in the style and props of the interior scenes. He delineated his sitters’ profiles in precise pencil and watercolor on paper. These profiles record a likeness without foreshortening or shading, making this format a preferred choice of many self-taught artists. The stiff poses suggest that Davis may have used the aid of a time-saving mechanical device that transferred the outline of a sitter onto a piece of paper to ensure a correct likeness.23See Peter Benes, “Machine-Assisted Portrait and Profile Imaging in New England after 1803,” in Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast, ed. Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1995), 118–50. Among the other distinguishing features of Davis’s work are exuberantly colorful carpets, delight in costume details, elaborate calligraphic inscriptions below the image that provide details about the sitters, and props that articulate their roles as upstanding members of a community that shared the values communicated by the artist.
In the inscription below the Caverlys’ portrait, Davis recorded each subject’s name, date of birth, and age at the time the picture was completed: “Charles Caverly. Aged 52 Septr 27th. Isaac L. Caverly. Aged 13 Months. Comfort Caverly. Aged 44. Feby 10th. 1836.” Based in part on the exquisite calligraphy that the left-handed Davis used to embellish scenes like this, scholars have surmised that he probably was both an itinerant artist and a writing master who offered instruction when rural schooling was erratic.24See Sparks, “Joseph H. Davis,” 66–69. Thus Davis, who was in his mid-twenties and had recently married in 1835, regularly interacted with families who had children and valued education.
In addition to expertly penned captions, Davis also frequently included pets in his watercolors. The Caverly family’s whimsically delineated calico cat gazes up at its master. Popular picture books of the period often featured engravings of children playing with pets to teach boys and girls that these animals were “created by the same benevolent hand as humans.”25Laura Wasowicz, “The Child’s Picture Gallery: Picture Books from Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in The Worlds of Children, 1620–1920, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 2004), esp. 151. Emphasis on the gentle training of pets echoed parents’ gentle approach to child discipline, in comparison with earlier eras.
Hearts—ancient symbols of human emotions that attained their greatest popularity during the nineteenth century—adorn the vase of flowers, Charles’s vest, and—as mentioned—baby Isaac’s dress.26See Robert Shaw, “United as This Heart You See: Memories of Friendship and Family,” in Katcher, Schorsch, and Wolfe, Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence, 84–101. Shaw quotes Wordsworth’s poem. Wordsworth recollected a joyous childhood, marred by the loss of his mother when he was only eight, in poetry colored with hearts and flowers:
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.27Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 356.
Despite their stiff poses, Charles and Comfort are drawn together by slight smiles and gazes—and by Isaac’s endearing gesture of reaching toward his father. As Wordsworth acknowledged, flowers, like those blooming in the Caverlys’ heart-decorated vase, will fade—all the more reason to paint portraits celebrating the tenderness of the human heart.
As noted, Davis painted numerous members of the Caverly clan. In The Azariah Caverly Family, three-year-old George holds a carpenter’s square in emulation of his father, Azariah, whose drawing identifies him as an architect, engineer, or carpenter; seven-month-old Sarah, held in her mother Eliza’s arms, sits near the family Bible. Davis’s props reflect a widespread perception of children as malleable instruments who could be encouraged to develop into adults with certain qualities, signified by prescribed attributes considered gender-appropriate.
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Description: The Azariah Caverly Family by Davis, Joseph H.
ATTRIBUTED TO JOSEPH H. DAVIS (1811–1865)
The Azariah Caverly Family, 1836
Watercolor and pencil on paper
11 × 15 in.
FENIMORE ART MUSEUM, COOPERSTOWN, NEW YORK, JEAN AND HOWARD LIPMAN COLLECTION, GIFT OF STEPHEN C. CLARK., N0061.1961. PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD WALKER
In both Caverly family groupings, the children’s engagement with their parents epitomizes the family structure that began to emerge in the late eighteenth century, when a less-authoritarian style of parenting joined new notions of the innocent nature of childhood. By the early nineteenth century, child-rearing manuals were published to guide parents—especially mothers—in fostering their young ones’ development through play. Social commentators, instructors, and parents embraced the conviction of John Locke and other Enlightenment philosophers that children were inherently good, full of potential, and capable of learning through play and imitating parental behavior.28On family history, see Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962); Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). In Davis’s family scenes, the children are celebrated within families stiffly posed yet linked by bonds of affection. The child’s moral and religious coaching by mothers—and practical instruction by fathers for sons—was deemed vital in a nation that depended upon a public- spirited and entrepreneurial citizenry. The lessons learned at home provided the foundation not only for the children pictured here but also for a young democracy that was growing into a mature republic.
But the Civil War would ravage the nation. Isaac’s brother Cyrus Caverly, who fought for the Union, was among the approximately 620,000 American soldiers killed in battle. Many others died of disease. Isaac—the baby held by his mother in Davis’s watercolor—also died during the war, although the cause remains unknown.29K. Torp and B. Ziegenmeyer, “New Hampshire Civil War Soldiers,” genealogytrails.com/newham/civilwarsoldiers_c.html. After outliving their two young adult sons, Charles died on June 6, 1872, aged eighty-seven; Comfort on March 30, 1876, aged eighty-five.30Torp and Ziegenmeyer, “New Hampshire Civil War Soldiers.” See also Caverly, Genealogy of the Caverly Family, 61.
“THE ROSE STILL IS FRAGRANT, THOUGH BROKE FROM THE STEM”
Samuel S. Miller's Portrait of a Girl
In the mid-nineteenth century, American infants accounted for 17 percent of all deaths; children, more than 38 percent. These mortality rates had remained nearly unchanged since colonial times.31Catherine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society, 1650–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 10–11, 70–71; Sally G. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 164–67, tables III, V, VI, VII, VII. Regarding mortality statistics, Scholten states that “mortality rates for children under age ten approached 50 percent” in the colonial era (p. 11); the physician who in 1844 appended a supplementary chapter to the first American edition of Louisa Barwell’s Infant Treatment confronted infant mortality statistics very similar to those Benjamin Franklin had observed a century earlier (p. 71). Notwithstanding, child-rearing by mothers was routinely touted as joyful. Physicians stressed nutrition, fresh air, and proper dress. Although helpful, such advice compounded parental guilt, for before modern medicine, even the most devoted care rarely saved a seriously ailing child. Many parents commissioned posthumous portraits to keep the semblance of their beloved, departed child present for family and friends, to preserve their memory beyond the lives of those who knew them, and to perpetuate family ties.32For a thoughtful discussion, see Stacy C. Hollander, Securing the Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture in America, exh. cat. (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2016), esp. 138–39 on Miller. Also see Phoebe Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” in A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, exh. cat. (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980), 71–89; Robin Jaffee Frank, “Small Portraits to ‘Cheer the Lonely Heart,’” in Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence: Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana, vol. 2, ed. Jane Katcher, David A. Schorsch, and Ruth Wolfe (Yale University Press in association with Marquand Books, 2011), 46–59.
Seventeen portraits painted in the 1840s and 1850s, fourteen of them depicting children, can be attributed to Samuel S. Miller based on style. The artist preferred flat frontal figures standing in the foreground, with the feet pointing in opposite directions. Besides bold colors and attention to details in clothing, he included flowers and trees as Christian symbols of death, mourning, and resurrection. When such a portrait was displayed inside the home, friends and family seeing it hanging beside other family pictures knew that the child had died, lending the image its ineffable sadness.
Little is known about Miller’s life or why he focused much of his practice on death. He was born in 1807 in Boston to Robert and Ann Wait Miller. His father passed away when Samuel was fourteen, and he appears to have been an only child—unusual at the time. Perhaps like so many of his era, he had experienced the deaths not only of his elders but also of siblings at a young age. The artist and his wife, Elvira Wait Miller, lived in Charlestown, Massachusetts, where their son Samuel was born in 1850 and their daughter Elvira Anna two years later. The artist would die of heart disease in 1853; his wife, Elvira, the following year of consumption, leaving behind their two young children.33Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620–1988, Ancestry.com.
Among Miller’s most poetic posthumous portraits is Cynthia Mary Osborn. Based on city death records, the subject is probably the Cynthia M. Osborn who died on April 27, 1841, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at approximately six to eight years of age. Other family members passed away in June and July.34Edward, aged thirty-four, in June; Eliza, aged nine, in July; see Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records. The cluster suggests that a contagious illness claimed their lives. Illustrated narratives of the time attempted to address children’s intimate experience of disease and death by promising young readers a reunion with their families, especially their mothers, in a domesticated heaven.35On children’s deathbed literature, see Jacqueline S. Renier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775–1850 (New York: Twayne, 1996), 90–95. Such promises might have comforted Cynthia before her death. Her loss would have devastated both parents. But the mother likely ministered to her child throughout the sickness and prepared the small body for burial.
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Description: Portrait of Cynthia Mary Osborn (1834–1841) by Miller, Samuel S.
SAMUEL S. MILLER (1807–1853)
Portrait of Cynthia Mary Osborn (1834–1841), after 1841
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Oil on canvas
49 × 26⅝ in.
L2015.41.170
Miller’s posthumous portrait of Cynthia partially granted to the bereaved their most fervent wish by picturing the dead as a living presence in tangible form. To conjure her person, Miller could have painted her likeness directly from the corpse, based it on verbal descriptions, or modeled it after a recently painted portrait or—given that she died soon after the invention of photography—a daguerreotype. Her evenly illuminated, delicately painted, expressionless face possesses an otherworldly quality. Not convincingly situated in space, Cynthia stands in the foreground of the canvas, close to the viewer, on a pathway before a gate—an emblematic passage from the land of the living to the hereafter. The scene resonates with funerary references.
Cynthia wears a pale pink gathered dress over pantaloons shirred and embellished with lace with inset bands of flowers. She resembles the rose of innocence that she plucks from a rosebush. The setting evokes the rural cemetery movement that arose in response to a growing sentimentality about death. Cynthia died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where in 1831 the first garden cemetery, Mount Auburn, had opened. There mourners communed with regenerative nature—like the rosebush in Miller’s portrait. Roses also enhance postmortem photography, which offered an inexpensive alternative to the painted portrait as a tangible memento. In a daguerreotype taken around the time of Cynthia’s death, a seemingly sleeping woman likewise holds a hand-tinted, pale pink rose.36Stanley B. Burns, MD, “Postmortem Daguerreotypes: The Burns Family Collection,” in Hollander, Securing the Shadow, 193, 220–21.
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Description: Young Woman with Rose
Young Woman with Rose, ca. 1844
Tinted sixth-plate daguerreotype
PHOTO © STANLEY B. BURNS, MD & THE BURNS ARCHIVE
Roses appear in many examples of mourning poetry found in popular magazines in nineteenth-century America. The compilation Our Little Ones in Heaven, published at midcentury in Boston, opens with a declaration by the Protestant Church of its belief in the salvation and eventual resurrection of deceased children. Throughout, as in Cynthia’s portrait, roses are common emblems of the transience of life. The poem “O Mourn Not, Fond Mother” offers consolation in harmony with Miller’s imagery:
The plant that you reared to smile on earth’s gloom,
Has fastened its roots in the soil of the tomb;
It smiled in your garden, so bright and so fair,
It has climbed o’er the wall, and is blossoming there. . . .
The rose still is fragrant, though broke from the stem,
The setting is ruined, but safe is the gem.
Then gird thee to labor, to trial and love,
The treasure once thine shall await thee above;
Be faithful, be earnest, night soon will be riven,
And the lost ones of earth, be thy jewels in heaven.37Rev. F. S. Smith, “O Mourn Not, Fond Mother,” in Walter Aimwell, Our Little Ones in Heaven (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1870), 133.
The dead will live again. Miller’s painting expresses the triumph of love and faith over life’s most formidable foe.
If roses suggested the transience of life, then the goldfinch—which Miller positions at the closest elevation to the sky, or heaven, in his scene—symbolized the new life promised by “O Mourn Not, Fond Mother.” In Christian theology, the bird alludes to the Resurrection of Christ. In the context of nineteenth-century America, specifically, its use by the artist may also reflect the evangelical Great Awakenings that swept the nation, reinvigorating belief in Christ’s Resurrection—and in the conviction that the saved would come back from the dead, with their bodies intact. The goldfinch frequently appears in Renaissance paintings, reproduced in prints, of the Christ Child playing with the bird. In Renaissance times, and still in the nineteenth century, birds were popular pets for children. Thus, the goldfinch not only emphasized Christ’s divinity but also humanized him by alluding to his childhood.38Herbert Friedmann, The Symbolic Goldfinch: Its History and Significance in European Devotional Art (Washington, D.C.: Pantheon Books, 1946); Philip Johnson, “Goldfinch: Symbol for Resurrection,” blog post, https://animalsmattertogod.com/2012/06/03/goldfinch-symbol-for-resurrection/.
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Description: Madonna of the Goldfinch by Raphael
RAPHAEL (1483–1520)
Madonna of the Goldfinch, 1505–6
Oil on panel
42 × 30¼ in.
UFFIZI GALLERY
Cynthia is likewise shown playing as she waits for her family in a semi-enclosed garden—a domesticated heaven where she is forever entertained by a hoop. A favorite outdoor activity of children for centuries, hoops were frequently included in illustrations of children’s games in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—with boys usually shown racing hoops, while girls posed beside them, as Cynthia does. New England toymakers and wooden-ware factories made wooden hoops. Cynthia would have propelled hers by stroking it along the top with her stick. While the pastime could be solitary, children also held contests for both the fastest and the longest hoop rollers. Another competitive game pitted one player rolling a hoop in a straight line along the ground against others trying to slip their sticks through the hoop as it passed them without knocking it down.39“Antique Toys: Rolling Hoop,” Victoriana, http://www.victoriana.com/antiquetoys/rollinghoop.html. In the context of this memorial portrait, the hoop’s circular shape—without beginning or end—signifies eternal life.
By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850, thanks to advancements in medicine. But even today, parents worry about protecting their children. As we look back upon the history of parenthood and childhood—expressed in a language beyond words in these portraits—we wonder at how much, or how little, family life has changed.
 
For research assistance at The Huntington, I warmly thank Elee Wood, former Curator/Educator, Fielding Collection for Early American Art, and Lily Allen, Curatorial Assistant in American Art.
 
Robin Jaffee Frank is the Director of the Silvermine Arts Center in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Vice Chair of the Board. She also is an independent museum curator, having formerly served as Chief Curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and Senior Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Yale University Art Gallery. She has organized numerous exhibitions throughout the United States, lectured extensively, and published widely on American visual culture from the colonial through contemporary periods. Dr. Frank holds a PhD in the history of art from Yale University.
 
1     Huntington Art Museum, object file for L2015.41.164. See Jeanne-Marie Zebrowski, “Just Plain Folk,” Maine Antique Digest, January 1981, 22A; Marguerite Riordan, advertisement, The Magazine Antiques, November 1992, 626–27; The Collection of Susan and Mark Laracy: Distinguished American Furniture and Folk Art (New York: Sotheby’s, 2007), lot 174. In the lot description, Paul S. D’Ambrosio identifies the sitters and dates the portraits to June 1801: “These portraits are the earliest documented portraits of Brewster’s extended 1801 sojourn in Newburyport, which suggests that the Coffins played a role in bringing the artist to the town. Brewster’s nine documented 1801 Newburyport portraits include: this pair, executed in June; portraits of Captain and Mrs. William Wise, painted in August; and five well-known portraits of the James Prince family painted in November.” The portraits of Captain and Mrs. William Wise are in a private collection; James Prince and Son William Henry, James Prince, Jr., and Benjamin Prince are in the collection of the Historical Society of Old Newbury. Portrait of Sarah Prince (also known as Silver Moon or Girl at the Pianoforte) is in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn. It must be noted, however, that two William Jennys portraits from 1807 that are allegedly of Major David Coffin and Elizabeth Stone Coffin, now in the collection of the Smith College Museum of Art (SC 1995:2-1 and 1995:2-2), do not resemble the couple portrayed by Brewster, now in the Fielding Collection. »
2     On Brewster, see especially Nina Fletcher Little, John Brewster, Jr., 1766–1854: Deaf-Mute Painter of Connecticut and Maine (Hartford, Conn.: Connecticut Historical Society, 1960); Harlan Lane, A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster, Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); and Paul S. D’Ambrosio, The World of John Brewster, Jr., 1766–1854, exh. cat. (Cooperstown, N.Y.: Fenimore Art Museum, 2006). »
3     Arline Meyer, “Re-dressing Classical Statuary: The Eighteenth-Century Hand-in-Waistcoat Portrait,” Art Bulletin 77 (March 1995): 45–63. »
4     On childbirth anxieties expressed in letters and diaries, see Elisabeth Donaghy Garrett, At Home: The American Family 1750–1870 (New York: Abrams, 1989), 227–31. »
5     For premarital pregnancy rates in New England, see Gloria L. Main, “Rocking the Cradle: Downsizing the New England Family,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 37, no. 1 (Summer 2006): 35–58, esp. 45, fig. 5. »
6     Some sources state either ten or eleven children; however, an examination of various records reveals that David and Elizabeth had twelve children, including two sons, Richard Pike and John Stone, who did not live to adulthood: Nathaniel (1787–1833), David (1788–1815), Mary (1790–1864), Richard Pike (1792–1793), Richard Pike or Richard Pitt (1794–1844), George (1797–1865), Isaac Stone (1798–1855), Ebenezer Stone (1801–1870), Elizabeth (1803–1858), Sarah Miller (1805–1836), John Stone (1807–1807), and Frances Boyd (1810–1881). The following genealogical sources were consulted: W. S. Appleton, Coffin Gatherings: Five Generations of Descendants of Tristram Coffin of Newbury and Nantucket (Boston: David Clapp and Son, 1896), 34; Louis Coffin, The Coffin Family, introduction by Will Gardner (1884; reprint, Nantucket, Mass.: Nantucket Historical Association, 1962), 155; Massachusetts Vital Records, 1620–1988, Ancestry.com; Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620–1988, Ancestry.com; Massachusetts, Marriage Records, 1840–1915, Ancestry.com; Massachusetts Death Records, 1841–1915, Ancestry.com; North America, Family Histories, 1500–2000, Ancestry.com; New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston; FindaGrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/, database and images: “Maj David Coffin,” 101757406; “Richard Pitt Coffin,” 101757407; “Richard Pike Coffin,” 85727348; “Sarah Coffin Miller Stevens,” 101758763; “Ancestors of ACB [Anna Coffin Benedict],” http://rgm3.net, entry 56; Town and Vital Records of Newbury, Essex, Massachusetts to the Year 1849 (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1911). »
7     Richard Pike’s life dates are July 1, 1792–October 24, 1793. See previous note. »
8     On the connection between the high-waisted style and maternity, see Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Williamsburg, Va., and New Haven, Conn.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in association with Yale University Press, 2002), 152; and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic, exh. cat. (Hartford and New Haven, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum and Yale University Press, 1991), 220. On removable bibs, see Ann Buermann Wass and Michelle Webb Fandrich, Clothing through American History: The Federal Era through Antebellum, 1786–1860 (Santa Barbara, Calif.: Greenwood, 2010), 108. »
9     Frances Geisewite Reiland, Footprints in History: Bradstreet, Brocklebank, Coffin, Dudley, Greenleaf, Johnson, Pierce, and Richardson Families in America (Newburyport, Mass.: Museum of Old Newbury, 2015), 74–77. For this reference, and for responding to my numerous inquiries and generously sharing research on the history of the Coffin family and Newburyport, I am enormously grateful to the Newburyport Public Library Archival Center. I especially and warmly thank Sharon Spieldenner, senior librarian/ archivist, as well as Dana Echelberger, staff librarian/ assistant archivist, and their research volunteers: Linda Tulley, Bob Richard, Carrie Poirier, and Sue Connell. I also thank Susan Edwards, executive director, and Emily Lawrence, assistant director, Museum of Old Newbury. »
10     For the distillery, see Newburyport Herald and Country Gazette, April 18, 1800, 4; for other goods, see September 27, 1799; April 8, 11, 15, and 25, 1800; May 16, 1800; and May 7, 1802. »
11     On full-scale portraits of women wearing miniatures, see Robin Jaffee Frank, Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery in association with Yale University Press, 2000), 21–35. »
12     At left is the North Church, Central Congregational, with the fish weather vane and three-pronged trident, on Titcomb Street; in the middle, the Religious Society, rebuilt on Pleasant Street in 1801; at right, the Old South Church, First Presbyterian, with a weathercock. Identifications courtesy of Sharon Spieldenner, Newburyport Public Library Archival Center. »
13     On “republican motherhood,” see Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective,” in Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays by Linda K. Kerber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 41–62. »
14     Elizabeth died on February 6, 1811; Newport Herald, February 8, 1811, 3. My thanks to Elee Wood. »
15     Reiland, Footprints in History, 74–77; Coffin, Coffin Family, 155; “Ancestors of ACB,” entry 56; “Sarah Coffin Miller Stevens,” FindaGrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/101758763/sarah-coffin-stevens. »
16     Reiland, Footprints in History, 74–77; Coffin, Coffin Family, 155; “Ancestors of ACB,” entry 56; “Maj David Coffin,” FindaGrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/101757406/david-coffin. »
17     Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2, pt. 1 (1966): 151–74. »
18     William Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” in The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, ed. A. J. George (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 354, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001428231; first published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807. »
19     Lydia Howard Sigourney, Letters to Mothers (Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Skinner, 1838), vii, viii. »
20     “Eliza Jane ‘Ej’ Caverly,” FindaGrave.com, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/162572627/eliza-jane-caverly. »
21     Robert B. Caverly, Genealogy of the Caverly Family, from the Year 1116 to the Year 1880, Made Profitable and Exemplified by Many a Lesson of Life (Lowell, Mass.: George M. Elliott, 1880), 61, New Hampshire Historical Society; and Ancestry.com, which includes dates for Eliza Jane but does not record Lavinia. Life dates gleaned from both sources. »
22     See Esther Sparks, “Joseph H. Davis,” in American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, ed. Jean Lipman and Tom Armstrong, exh. cat. (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1980), 66–69; and Arthur and Sybil Kern, “Joseph H. Davis: Identity Established,” The Clarion, Summer 1989, 46–65, https://issuu.com/american_folk_art_museum/docs/clarion_14_3_sum1989. Also see Robin Jaffee Frank, “Portraits of Children,” in Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence: Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana, vol. 1, ed. Jane Katcher, David A. Schorsch, and Ruth Wolfe (Yale University Press in association with Marquand Books, 2006), 104–21. »
23     See Peter Benes, “Machine-Assisted Portrait and Profile Imaging in New England after 1803,” in Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast, ed. Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1995), 118–50. »
24     See Sparks, “Joseph H. Davis,” 66–69. »
25     Laura Wasowicz, “The Child’s Picture Gallery: Picture Books from Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts,” in The Worlds of Children, 1620–1920, ed. Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 2004), esp. 151. »
26     See Robert Shaw, “United as This Heart You See: Memories of Friendship and Family,” in Katcher, Schorsch, and Wolfe, Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence, 84–101. Shaw quotes Wordsworth’s poem. »
27     Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” 356. »
28     On family history, see Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage, 1962); Carl N. Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); and Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1983). »
29     K. Torp and B. Ziegenmeyer, “New Hampshire Civil War Soldiers,” genealogytrails.com/newham/civilwarsoldiers_c.html. »
30     Torp and Ziegenmeyer, “New Hampshire Civil War Soldiers.” See also Caverly, Genealogy of the Caverly Family, 61. »
31     Catherine M. Scholten, Childbearing in American Society, 1650–1850 (New York: New York University Press, 1985), 10–11, 70–71; Sally G. McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), 164–67, tables III, V, VI, VII, VII. Regarding mortality statistics, Scholten states that “mortality rates for children under age ten approached 50 percent” in the colonial era (p. 11); the physician who in 1844 appended a supplementary chapter to the first American edition of Louisa Barwell’s Infant Treatment confronted infant mortality statistics very similar to those Benjamin Franklin had observed a century earlier (p. 71). »
32     For a thoughtful discussion, see Stacy C. Hollander, Securing the Shadow: Posthumous Portraiture in America, exh. cat. (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2016), esp. 138–39 on Miller. Also see Phoebe Lloyd, “Posthumous Mourning Portraiture,” in A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth Century America, ed. Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong, exh. cat. (Stony Brook, N.Y.: Museums at Stony Brook, 1980), 71–89; Robin Jaffee Frank, “Small Portraits to ‘Cheer the Lonely Heart,’” in Expressions of Innocence and Eloquence: Selections from the Jane Katcher Collection of Americana, vol. 2, ed. Jane Katcher, David A. Schorsch, and Ruth Wolfe (Yale University Press in association with Marquand Books, 2011), 46–59. »
33     Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records, 1620–1988, Ancestry.com. »
34     Edward, aged thirty-four, in June; Eliza, aged nine, in July; see Massachusetts, Town and Vital Records. »
35     On children’s deathbed literature, see Jacqueline S. Renier, From Virtue to Character: American Childhood, 1775–1850 (New York: Twayne, 1996), 90–95. »
36     Stanley B. Burns, MD, “Postmortem Daguerreotypes: The Burns Family Collection,” in Hollander, Securing the Shadow, 193, 220–21. »
37     Rev. F. S. Smith, “O Mourn Not, Fond Mother,” in Walter Aimwell, Our Little Ones in Heaven (Boston: Gould and Lincoln, 1870), 133. »
38     Herbert Friedmann, The Symbolic Goldfinch: Its History and Significance in European Devotional Art (Washington, D.C.: Pantheon Books, 1946); Philip Johnson, “Goldfinch: Symbol for Resurrection,” blog post, https://animalsmattertogod.com/2012/06/03/goldfinch-symbol-for-resurrection/. »
39     “Antique Toys: Rolling Hoop,” Victoriana, http://www.victoriana.com/antiquetoys/rollinghoop.html. »
“The Human Heart by Which We Live”: Family Portraits from Cradle to Grave
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