RUTH HENSHAW BASCOM | PAIR OF PROFILE PORTRAITS

found in the Spofford, New Hampshire area;

Private Collection, Rhode Island;

Frank & Barbara Pollack American Antiques, Highland Park, Illinois.

"Winter Antiques Show," Antiques and the Arts Weekly, January 30, 2004, p. 34

This exceptional pair of portrait is by the celebrated itinerant American artist Ruth Henshaw Bascom (1772-1848).  Bascom was a prolific portrait artist in Federal-era Massachusetts. Born in Leicester, Massachusetts, Ruth was the oldest daughter born to American patriot and Minutemen organizer William Henshaw (1735-1820) and his wife, Phebe Swan Henshaw (1753-1808). She was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts where she married Dartmouth College professor Asa Miles in 1804, who died shortly thereafter in 1806. Following the untimely death of her first husband, Ruth married Reverend Ezekiel Bascom, a prominent clergyman in Massachusetts who, along with his wife, traveled extensively through England and the United States. The artist's career is documented not only by her portraiture but also by her personal journals, which she meticulously maintained from 1789 to 1846. These exceptional records, housed today at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, provide extensive insight into the subjects of more than two hundred portraits completed by the artist. In order to create a realistic image, she first outlined a cast shadow of the sitter on her drawing paper, and then colored the picture using pastel crayons. For information on Ruth Henshaw Bascom see Susanne M. Dawson and M. Susan Barger, "'Painted on Frances' Copy:' Profiles of Ruth Henshaw Bascom," Daughters of the American Revolution Magazine, 120(8), 692-3, 706, 710; Roeber, A. Gregg, "A New England Woman's Perspective on Norfolk Virginia, 1801-1802: Excerpts from the Diary of Ruth Henshaw Bascom," PAAS, 88 (1978), 277-325; Mary Eileen Egan, Ruth Henshaw Bascom, New England Portraitist (Thesis, College of the Holy Cross, 1980); Mary Eileen Fouratt, "Ruth Henshaw Bascom, Itinerant Portraitist," Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 9 (1984) (Boston: 1986), 190-211; Lois Avigad, "Ruth Henshaw Bascom: A Youthful Viewpoint," Clarion 12 (Fall 1987): 35-41; "American Folk Art: Two Groups of Family Portraits by Ruth Henshaw Bascom and Erastus Salisbury Field," Worcester Art Museum Bulletin 5 (May 1976): 1-12; Allison Johnson, "The Journal of Ruth Henshaw Bascom, 1789-1796: Issues of Community and Change in the Lives of Young Women in the Early Republic" (master's thesis, University of New Hampshire, 1993); Ruth Henshaw Bascom, Journals, 1789-1846, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.