Emily Eastman

Emily Eastman painted watercolor portraits in a so-called naïve style typical of self-trained American painters working in New England in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Almost nothing is known of Eastman's life. She was born in Loudon, New Hampshire, some seventy-five miles northwest of Boston, Massachusetts, and married Dr. Daniel Baker in 1824. Between about 1820 and 1830, Eastman made several watercolor bust portraits of women in fashionable dress and coiffure; one likeness of a young girl is also known.

Eastman's images of women, most carefully drawn in graphite and then precisely colored in watercolors, are evidently based on the rather stiff, idealized fashion plates published in women's magazines of the time. Eastman borrowed sophisticated poses that show bodies and heads slightly turned for elegant effect, and she delineated such details as jewelry, lace, and corkscrew curls with an evident pleasure in abstract pattern. Her work is emblematic of New England "folk" art in its emulation of urban high-style juxtaposed with an emphasis on pure surface decoration for its own sake.

Like many contemporary folk artists, Eastman rarely signed her paintings, but those that are unsigned can be identified speculatively as her work on the basis of such similarities as prominent thin, delicately arched eyebrows, small bowed mouths, and elaborate coiffures of tight curls crowned by jewelry, flowers, and other adornments. A mark of folk portraiture, the repetitive use of common poses, formats, styles of dress and hair, and even facial features was considered not only acceptable but desirable by both artists and patrons who valued portraiture above all as a record of social and economic standing.