Ruth Henshaw Bascom (1772 - 1848)

Edith Gregor Halpert;

Sotheby Parke-Bernet, November 14, 1973, sale 3572, lot 24;

Private Collection;

Frank Miele at Hirschl and Adler, 1990.

Terry Dintenfass Gallery, 18 East 67th Street, New York, 1973;

Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth Texas, "Popular Art of the 18th and 19th Century," September 14- November 19, 1967.

Remi Spriggs, “Living with antiques: An Americana collection in New Jersey,” Magazine Antiques (April 2005), 94-105;

Nancy Brannigan Painter, “Objects of Affection,” New Jersey Monthly (November 2006), 112-7;

Leslie and Peter Warwick, Love At First Sight: Discovering Stories About Folk Art & Antiques Collected by Two Generations & Three Families, (New Jersey: 2022), pp. 248-50, fig. 421-421a.

Ruth Henshaw Bascom (1772-1848) was born in Leicester, Massachusetts and her diary, which she started at the age of sixteen in 1789 and kept for fifty-seven years until 1846, serves as a rare first-hand documentation of the artist's life, process, and sitters for whom she portrayed. She began taking profiles in 1801 and her art can be delineated into three phases, which she intermingled: the First Phase (1801- mid-1820s) which typically consisted of a profile cutout over a darker sheet of paper, mostly of people who lived in Phillipston and Ashby, Massachusetts, the Second Phase (1828-mid-1830s), the start of her itinerant career and containing collage portraits with separately cut clothing parts, and the Third Phase (mid-1830s-1846) where she usually drew the likenesses on one sheet of paper and sometimes used green trees to highlight the sitter’s face or had upper corner convex arcs to suggest an oval inner frame. In 1828-1846, she made over 1,400 profiles and traveled between Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Maine.

The profile cutout portraits of Amelia Dwight Flint (1806-1873)and her husband, Dr. Joseph Henshaw Flint (1786-1846) reflect Bascom’s second phase, although they were completed in 1840 when she was creating third phase portraits. Dr. Joseph Flint was none other than Bascom’s nephew; his mother being Ruth's half-sister, Elizabeth Henshaw, and Amelia Dwight was his second wife, whom he had eight children with. Dr. Flint was educated by his father and uncle who were both doctors, and he assumed his uncle’s practice in Petersham, Massachusetts in 1813. In 1825, the Flints moved to Northampton, Massachusetts after he received an honorary doctorate from Harvard, which is attached to the verso of his portrait. One of Dr. Flint's famous patients was another famous folk artist, Joseph Whiting Stock. In 1839, when Stock was applying varnish to one of his paintings, it caught on fire and badly burned his hands, face, and neck, weakening his immune system, which resulted in an infection in his hip bone. Dr. Flint successfully removed Stock’s hip bone, a risky surgery even today. One year later, the Flints moved to Springfield, Massachusetts where Dr. Flint, age 54, and his wife, Amelia, age 34, had their portraits taken by his aunt, Ruth Bascom on April 29, 1840.