Connecticut-born Samuel Waldo received artistic training from the painter Joseph Steward in Hartford before beginning his career as a portrait painter. After brief stints painting portraits in Hartford and Litchfield, Connecticut, and Charleston, South Carolina, Waldo traveled to London to study with Benjamin West (see B.67.26 and B.67.25) and at the Royal Academy, where he absorbed the painterly qualities of the British portraitist Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830). Waldo returned in 1809 to New York, where he became a respected portraitist. William Jewett (1792–1874), by training a coach painter, became Waldo’s apprentice in 1812 and his partner in 1817. Together, Waldo and Jewett formed one of the most artistically and commercially successful portrait studios in nineteenth-century New York. Between 1817 and 1854, Waldo and Jewett painted prominent New York families, celebrities, and dignitaries, and both became associate members of the National Academy of Design, New York. Waldo, the superior artist, usually painted the sitter and Jewett the props, costumes, and background.

This portrait, when acquired, was attributed to Samuel Waldo alone. In 1975, the painting was assigned to both artists on the basis that they were in partnership by the time this portrait was painted. Throughout his career, Waldo painted portraits independently of his partner, and Marcia Goldberg has suggested that this portrait may be by Waldo alone, based on its similarity to other portraits of young women of this same period; further, she argues for a date of about 1820 because of the sitter’s costume.

Although the identity of this sitter has eluded scholars, she is depicted as a fashionable, cultivated, and wealthy woman, posed against a dramatic background sky and seated on a bergére. She looks up from her reading to meet the viewer’s gaze, her long, graceful fingers marking her place in her book. Her elegant yellow dress suggests the taste for Empire-style dress made fashionable by Empress Josephine during Napoleon’s reign. With a sure hand and painterly brio, the artist has suggested the rich qualities of the various fabrics and textures—the light silks and transparent lace double collar, the sheen of her upswept hair, and her delicate skin. The bravura handling of this painting characterizes Waldo’s strongest work.

Related examples: Those by Waldo include Mrs. John Gamble, c. 1816, Munson­Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York; and Hester Hanford, early 1820s, Albany lnstitute of History and Art.

Book excerpt: David B. Warren, Michael K. Brown, Elizabeth Ann Coleman, and Emily Ballew Neff. American Decorative Arts and Paintings in the Bayou Bend Collection. Houston: Princeton Univ. Press, 1998.