*, Ruth Henshaw Bascom

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Description

Ruth Henshaw Bascom
Portrait of Helen Mann (Rugg), of Fitchburg, Massachusetts
pastel and pencil on paper, cut to profile with appliquèd gold foil paper necklace
framed 17 1/4 by 13 1/4 in. 43.8 by 33.56 cm.

painted 1834; in a period frame. The blue background paper is a correct period replacement.

Provenance

Stephen Score, Boston, Massachusetts

Frank J. Miele, New York

Literature

Supplement to A Loving Likeness: American Folk Portraits of the Nineteenth Century, Princeton, New Jersey, 1997, p. 2

Catalogue Note

A paper label affixed to the back of Helen's picture identifies her and her brother Charles as being from Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Bascom's journal records Helen's image as being taken on several dates in 1834. (This journal was transcribed in 1980 by Mary Eileen Egan [no relation] Fouratt, for her honors thesis Ruth Henshaw Bascom: New England Portraitist, done for Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts.)

Ruth Henshaw Bascom was born in Leicester, Massachusetts. Her life and career as a portraitist is exceptionally well documented, owing to the existence of the aforementioned journal she kept from 1789 through 1846, in which she recorded more than one thousand likenesses. After the death of her first husband in 1805, the artist married the Reverend Ezekiel Bascom and settled in Gerry (now Phillipston), Massachusetts, where she was a teacher, church record keeper, librarian, hat maker, and artist. In 1821 the Bascoms moved to Ashby, Massachusetts and by 1828 Ruth was producing about forty portraits a year, working in Ashby, Cambridge Port, Boston, and Athol, Massachusetts. After Reverend Bascom’s failing health forced him to spend winters in Savannah, Georgia, Ruth stayed behind and traveled in central Massachusetts and parts of Maine painting portraits. The couple lived briefly in Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire where Reverend Bascom died in 1841. Ruth Henshaw Bascom died in Ashby in 1848.

Bascom’s more than two hundred extant portraits are all rendered in life-size profile, reflecting her method of capturing in pencil the shadowed outline of a sitter cast on a wall by a light source. These outlines would then be filled in with further pencil drawing for facial features and clothing, and pastel crayons for color. Bascom often applied necklaces earrings, and glasses made of gold foil paper, and periodically altered profiles and updated costumes as subjects aged and styles changed.

Excerpted from Lois S. Avigad, ``Ruth Henshaw Bascom: A Youthful Viewpoint'', The Clarion, vol. 12 (Fall 1987) pp. 35-41; Paul S. D’Ambrosio and Charlotte Emans, Folk Art’s Many Faces: Portraits in the New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, 1987, pp. 30-31.