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Maria Gansevoort Melvill (Mrs. Allan Melvill)
Ezra Amesc. 1815
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Washington, DC, United States
Details
- Title: Maria Gansevoort Melvill (Mrs. Allan Melvill)
- Creator: Ezra Ames
- Date Created: c. 1815
- Physical Dimensions: overall: 76.2 x 59.7 cm (30 x 23 1/2 in.) framed: 97.8 x 82.6 x 8.3 cm (38 1/2 x 32 1/2 x 3 1/4 in.)
- Provenance: The sitter [1791-1872]; by descent to her granddaughter, Charlotte Elizabeth Hoadley [1858-1946], Chicago.[1] (C.W. Lyon, New York); sold 26 January 1917 to Thomas B. Clarke [1848-1931], New York;[2] (sale, American Art Association, New York, 7 January 1919, no. 24); E. T. Heckscher.[3] Again Thomas B. Clarke by December 1921;[4] his estate; sold as part of the Clarke collection on 29 January 1936, through (M. Knoedler & Co., New York), to The A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust, Pittsburgh; gift 1947 to NGA. [1] At the sitter's death in 1872, the portrait presumably passed to her daughter, Katherine G. Hoadley [d. 1905], Boston (possibly through Hoadley's sister, Frances Priscilla Melville [d. 1885], who had lived with her mother and continued to occupy the family home in Gansevoort, New York, until her own death). (Herman Melville, in a letter of 1875 to his cousin Catherine Gansevoort Lansing, refers to "mother's portrait" hanging in the family home at Gansevoort [Paltsits 1977, 33]). At the time of Katherine Hoadley's death, Charlotte Hoadley was her oldest surviving child and only surviving daughter. According to a codicil to Katherine's will, dated 23 April 1894 (no. 129493, Suffolk County Probate Court, Massachusetts), Charlotte Hoadley inherited "all my furniture, pictures, books, plate, crockery, linen and similar articles." See also the undated, handwritten label (in NGA curatorial files) that attributes the portrait to Gilbert Stuart and calls it the "Property of Charlotte Hoadley." The Stuart attribution has never been accepted. [2] The name of the dealer and the date of the purchase by Clarke are recorded in a copy of _Portraits by Early American Artists of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth, and Nineteenth Centuries Collected by Thomas B. Clarke_, Exh. cat. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1928, annotated with information from files of M. Knoedler & Co., NY (copy in NGA curatorial records and in NGA library). [3] Heckscher's name is recorded in an annotated copy of the 1919 sale catalogue in the Frick Art Reference Library, New York.
- Rights: CC0
- Medium: oil on wood
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