Anne Catharine Hoof Green

Anne Catherine Hoof Green achieved professional success in an era when most middle-class white women were limited to domestic responsibilities. Following the death of her husband, Jonas Green, in 1767, she managed his printing shop in Annapolis, Maryland, earning enough money to pay off his debts and purchase the building that housed the printing press, her six children, and herself. She became the Maryland Assembly’s official printer of government documents and reported on events and opinions leading up to the Revolutionary War as editor and publisher of the Maryland Gazette.

Green expressed her sense of accomplishment by commissioning this portrait just two years after her husband’s death. Her portraitist, Charles Willson Peale, made one crucial deviation from the conven-tions of female portraiture that he had learned while studying in London. In her lap, Green holds an issue of her newspaper, the Maryland Gazette, with the words ANNAPOLIS PRINTER clearly legible.