Harriet Sophia Jones

The New England folk artist Erastus Salisbury Field was largely self-taught. During the first phase of his career he worked as an itinerant portrait painter in and around his hometown of Leverett, Massachusetts, and in the villages stretching south along the Connecticut River. He produced more than 150 portraits for his rural clientele in a frank, decidedly linear style. He enlivened these works with finely worked details of dress and setting, such as embroidered lace collars, pleated bonnets, and brightly patterned carpets. Field's most productive time as a country "face painter" came in the 1830s. It was at the beginning of that decade that he painted his portrait of Harriet Sophia Jones. Shown here at the age of four, Harriet (1829-1915) wears a fashionable Empire-style frock and carries a basket of pink roses. Her parents were Sophia Fuller (d. 1894) and Charles Backus Jones (d. 1878), who married in 1828 and settled in Monson, Massachusetts, some twenty miles south of Leverett.

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