Artwork Title: Joseph Moore and His Family

Joseph Moore and His Family, 1839

Erastus Salisbury Field

Artwork Title: Joseph Moore and His FamilyArtwork Title: Joseph Moore and His FamilyArtwork Title: Joseph Moore and His FamilyArtwork Title: Joseph Moore and His FamilyArtwork Title: Joseph Moore and His FamilyArtwork Title: Joseph Moore and His FamilyArtwork Title: Joseph Moore and His FamilyArtwork Title: Joseph Moore and His Family
"I adore family portraits, the suave and the crude. I love how they tell us so much about the individual personalities and about the group dynamic. Or they don't; how many false narratives are memorialized in these spare or crowded compositions? And how is character - false or genuine - revealed? Are we more likely to find the truth in the work of a very accomplished artist, the one whose technique is completely secure, who has the ability to capture a likeness, to accurately describe space and surfaces? Or should we put more faith in the naïve or less skilled painter, whose real struggle just to get things right, might diminish the likelihood of gross flattery or any calculated revision of the way the family members relate to each other? With old portraits we rarely know much if anything about the true story of these family relationships. But it's "story" and "relationship" that come down to us, anyway. Whether truth or obfuscation, the stories of these nonetheless real people continue to play out, to reach out to us. In paint and in two dimensions." (http://godsandfoolishgrandeur.blogspot.nl/2016/12/random-families-random-family-portraits.html) In 1839, after a brief period of artistic training under Samuel F. B. Morse in New York and more than a decade working successfully in the Connecticut River Valley as a portrait painter, Erastus Salisbury Field returned to Ware, Massachusetts, to live with his in-laws. Across the street lived the family of Joseph Moore, a traveling dentist in the summer when the roads were passable and a hatter in the winter months. This portrait of Field’s neighbors was the largest and most complex he ever painted. Moore and his wife, Almira Gallond Moore, are shown nearly life-size, seated in gaily painted Hitchcock chairs and surrounded by attentive children—their two sons at right and their recently orphaned niece and nephew at left. Like many folk painters, Field combined careful attention to detail (scrupulously recording Moore’s birthmark, for example, and the ornate pattern of Mrs. Moore’s collar) with attractive eccentricities of composition and drawing. The figures and the features of the room are stringently balanced. Field’s perspective is haphazard: the mirror’s shadow recedes in the wrong direction, while the patterned carpet is not foreshortened and so appears to run uphill. And the children look like little elves, with pointy ears and stubby fingers. This text was adapted from Gerald W. R. Ward et al., American Folk (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001). Provenance (http://www.mfa.org/collections/object/joseph-moore-and-his-family-33604)
Uploaded on Jul 31, 2017 by Suzan Hamer

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