Lot 370: MARY B. WAY (1769-1833)

PROFILE BUST PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN

measurements
oval 2 1/2 by 1 7/8 in.

alternate measurements
6.35 by 4.8cm

Executed circa 1800; now in a shadow box frame.

Cut paper, silk, gilt thread, lace appliqués mounted over brown silk in a gold-metal locket frame

NOTE

Sisters Mary Way and Elizabeth Way (Champlain) were born into a New London, Connecticut, mercantile family just before the Revolution. By the 1790s, when they reached their early twenties, both were painting miniature portaits of neighbors and relatives.

Mary Way abandoned Connecticut for New York in 1811 at the age of forty-two. There she quickly worked her way into the fringes of a coterie of successful painters including John Jarvis, Joseph Wood, and Anson Dickinson, who critiqued her style and loaned her paintings to copy. By 1818, Mary Way had attracted a significant clientel, drawing both from parishioners at her Universalist church and older New London connections; she advertised a "ladies drawing academy" in the New York papers and she had two miniatures on ivory included in the annual exhibition of the American Academy of Fine Arts. Mary Way was never a star in the city's art scene. And she never attained financial security. Still, when blindness ended her career in 1820, the Academy sponsored a benefit to raise money on her behalf.

While no evidence survives to explain exactly how or when the Way sisters learned to paint, it seems probable that they encountered some sort of art instruction during stints at one of Connecticut's many female academies. The combination of delicately painted faces, applique, embroidery, and fine decorative sewing recalls the elaborate needlework pictures that young ladies produced at the culmination of their schooling.