Mary Elizabeth Smith

Baby Mary Elizabeth Smith sits in a rush-bottomed armchair in Ammi Phillips’s portrait. Set against a plain dark background, she wears a white dress with an embroidered hem, lace-bordered short sleeves, and a red sash echoed in the red bows that adorn her sleeves and frilled cap. In the nineteenth century, such clothing served both little boys and girls: Mary’s triple-strand necklace of coral beads identified her as female while also warding off evil and illness, according to contemporary belief. She holds a sprig of strawberry plant in her lap and with her left hands grasps a single ripe berry on its stem. Symbols of youthful vitality, the berries complement the full cheeks and plump dimpled arms of the child, who was six months old when Phillips painted her portrait in October of 1827, according to Smith family history. Although her contrived pose thus is a fiction, the artist captured the promising prospects for a healthy long life that fond parents might imagine for their young child.

An only child, Mary Elizabeth Smith was born in Orange County, New York, and remained in that area her entire life. She became a schoolteacher and is said to have founded a school in nearby Pound Ridge, New Jersey. With high rates of child mortality in the early nineteenth century, portraits of young children were often created as mementos in the event of an early death. Like many other itinerant portrait painters of the time, Phillips frequently made likenesses of multiple members of a single family, and he painted Mary’s parents about the same time he created this likeness. Here, the sitter’s finery, as well as the portrait itself, proclaims her family’s prosperity.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, growing prosperity brought the luxury of painted portraits of family members into the reach of increasing numbers of ordinary Americans. Along with Erastus Salisbury Field, William Matthew Prior and Joseph Whiting Stock, Phillips was one of many artists who met the demand in rural regions in New England. These artists typically used a limited number of stock poses, props, and even costumes to make their production more efficient; for consumers, this practice ensured a predictable result. The gesture of Mary’s arms and the strawberry sprig and single berry are features Phillips used for an older sitter in his Girl in a Red Dress (TF 1992.57), among other portraits. The position of her seated body, shown at three-quarter length and slightly turned, quotes a pictorial convention with origins in an English aristocratic portrait tradition. The rich colors and strong contrasts of light and dark, meanwhile, are characteristic of Phillips’s portraits of the 1820s.

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