Young Woman with Flowers in Her Hair

The young lady depicted in Emily Eastman's watercolor portrait is a fashionable beauty who looks out from beneath her ringed brown locks under a diaphanous head-scarf. The yellow and white roses that crown her coiffure are matched by a similar corsage at her breast. The slight turning of the figure, so that one bejeweled ear is visible, adds a note of sophistication to an image otherwise inscribed by a naïve love of pure pattern: the serrated edges of the rose leaves mimic the zigzag border of the scarf and the lace trim of the blue dress, for example, and the round forms of the woman's wave-like spiraling curls are echoed in the spherical gold beads of her necklace. The stylized simplicity of the facial features, meanwhile, reveals the artist's awareness of the conventions of idealized portraiture rather than direct observation.

The overwhelming attention to details of adornment in this portrait further suggests Eastman's particular emulation of the highly typed "fashion plates" in nineteenth-century women's magazines, which helped circulate elegant urban styles in dress and coiffure in the American hinterland. To be portrayed in such terms, rather than represented naturalistically as an individual, was considered a sign of fashionable sophistication among the many ordinary Americans who patronized the largely self-trained artists, such as Eastman, flourishing in America, especially in New England, before the advent of portrait photography.

Many of these artists were men who traveled freely from village to village. As a marriageable and later a married woman, Eastman probably did not enjoy such freedoms, but she may have found patrons in and around her hometown. Her preferred medium of watercolor on paper also was used by such male itinerant artists as Joseph H. Davis, perhaps because it was portable and inexpensive, allowing rapid production of small-scale portraits suitable for the walls of middle-class parlors. While male artists could use the "feminine" medium of watercolors, however, painting in relatively messy oils was considered unladylike. As Young Woman with Flowers in Her Hair shows, watercolor allowed Eastman to achieve delicate effects of tone and line considered suitable equally to the refined aesthetic sensibility of the lady-artist and the feminine features of her sitters. Eastman drew rather than painted her subject in thin outlines of watercolor, and then filled in different areas with washes of rich color.

Two Centuries of American Folk Painting, Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Evanston, Illinois, February 10–April 21, 1985.

(Re)Presenting Women, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, October 16, 2001–January 13, 2002.

A Rich Simplicity: Folk Art from the Terra Foundation for the Arts Collection, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, June 7–September 21, 2003.