Young Boy Holding a Bow and Arrow with a Drum on the Floor

Young Boy Holding a Bow and Arrow with a Drum on the Floor is a likeness of an unidentified well-dressed child proudly displaying typical boys’ playthings as he stands in a simple interior space defined by a bare wood plank floor and unadorned back wall. The drum on the floor and bow and stick “arrow” in the figure’s hands suggest the martial play of youth and male qualities of discipline, courage, and vigor to which the boy aspires, as indicated in his direct gaze, alert expression, and upright stance. However, his carefully arranged curls and “feminine” attire—short, fancy dress over lacy bodice and pantaloons—indicate that the child is young enough to be still in the maternal sphere of influence: not until the age of five or six did a boy in the nineteenth century begin to wear distinctly masculine clothing.

William Matthew Prior was a prolific artist who worked in a wide range of styles determined by the tastes and means of his patrons. Sturtevant J. Hamblen (or Hamblin), his brother-in-law and pupil and later junior partner, was one of four artist brothers who were third-generation decorative painters. Prior and Hamblen were adaptable practitioners who regarded their portrait practice as a business rather than a means for personal self-expression. They drew from a stock of conventions, symbolic props, and even costumes to deliver a “likeness” that recorded a customer’s social and economic standing and flattered his aspirations for status, rather than revealing his unique personality and actual physical appearance. The mask-like impassivity of the boy in this portrait reflects the values of Prior and Hamblin’s provincial New England customers, for whom a portrait served as both an icon of social and familial position and a purely decorative object, pleasing the eye through vivid colors and patterns.

Like Prior's Double Portrait of Mary Cary and Susan Elizabeth Johnson (TF 1992.122), also in the Terra Foundation collection, Young Boy Holding a Bow and Arrow with a Drum on the Floor represents the middle ground in Prior's work between his relatively naturalistic portraits, influenced by American painter Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), and his simplest "flat" likenesses, without shading or modeling, for which he offered a discount. By placing the figure within a setting, however bare, Prior suggests an illusion of three-dimensional reality continued in the simple modeling of the face and limbs and the shadows cast by the dress on the pantaloons. Plain, smooth surfaces, such as the pantaloon legs, the boy's bare arms and chest, and the drum top, are juxtaposed against elaborately detailed areas of rhythmic pattern: the boy's curls, his striped lace bodice, the white ribbon embroidery on his green dress, and the tension cords that encircle the drum. These features suggest that the subject's family was relatively well-to-do and familiar with some of the attributes of more academic portraiture.

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Portrait of Young Boy Holding Bow and Arrow with Drum on the Floor, William Matthew Prior and Sturtevant J. Hamblin. Collection Cameo sheet, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, December 1992. Ill. (black & white).

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