Son of an Irish immigrant sea captain in Boston, George P. A. Healy taught himself the rudiments of painting and established a portrait trade in Boston, where he came to the attention of Thomas Sully (see B.81.11), who encouraged him to study abroad. After studying in the atelier of Antoine-Jean Gros in Paris and taking the Grand Tour of Europe, Healy began his long and prolific career as a fashionable and celebrated international portraitist, known for his virtuoso talent, speed of execution, and charming demeanor. In 1842, Healy began a series of trans-Atlantic crossings to Washington, D.C., and Boston to paint American presidents and dignitaries for King Louis-Phillipe of France’s Versailles Gallery. On one of these Boston sojourns, he painted the widow Lydia Smith Russell, the subject of Bayou Bend’s portrait. 

Lydia Smith Russell (1786–1859) was a worldly, cultured, well-educated artist. The daughter of Barney Smith and Ann Otis, Lydia lived in France and England as a child and studied with Gilbert Stuart (see B.72.117 and B.61.55). According to family tradition, she also studied with Benjamin West (see B.67.26 and B.67.25). While in France, Lydia studied at the rigorous school of Madame Campan, whose philosophy for raising young women was, in her own words, to “not give way to a belief of the impossibility of uniting, in a girl perfectly educated, accomplishments and duties, which general opinion falsely deems incompatible.” In 1817, Lydia became the second wife of Jonathan Russell (1771–1832) of Providence, Rhode Island, who earlier had served as charge d’affaires in Paris (1810) and London (1811) and as commissioner to negotiate peace with Great Britain to end the War of 1812.

Lydia had been a widow for at least ten years when Healy painted her. She is seated in a crimson-colored upholstered armchair, dressed in an elegant black dress trimmed with black lace off the shoulders and white lace at the neck. Shot through with red, green, and gold, a fanciful turban knotted around her head, its tassels dangling at the sides to frame her face, adds an exotic touch to a rather dignified and restrained portrait, in which Lydia turns toward the viewer with alert yet mournful eyes and just the hint of a smile. 

This fanciful headgear is related to the eighteenth-century fashion for dressing “à la turque,” a vaguely Turkish style popular at London masquerade parties and later revived following Napoleon’s return from Egypt. Of course, turbans worn by American women sitters had a long history before Healy, including Thomas Sully’s bravura portrait of his Baltimore patron Mrs. Robert Gilmor (1823, Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston) and Charles Bird King’s Portrait of Mrs. Samuel Harrison Smith (1829, Redwood Library, Newport). The Healy portrait is perhaps most similar to Sarah Miriam Peale’s portrait Mrs. Richard Cooke Tilghman (c. 1830–33, Baltimore Museum of Art), in which the Baltimore sitter is portrayed within an oval format wearing a plain black dress, a white scarf at the neck, and a fanciful turban. Given Lydia’s artistic accomplishments, it is tempting to associate her wearing a turban with the paintings of turban-clad “Turkish bathers” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867), the dominant artist of France during her own artistic coming-of-age.

Related examples: George P. A. Healy, Mrs. Andrew Stevenson, c. 1839, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond; Gilbert Stuart, Lydia Smith, c. 1807, private collection.

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.