Mrs. Reuben Allerton (Lois Atherton)

Discussion

FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO’S CATALOG

Ammi Phillips was a self-taught, itinerant portrait painter and plied his trade in western Connecticut, western Massachusetts, and New York. He first appeared as a professional portrait painter in a July 29, 1809, advertisement placed in the Berkshire Reporter (Pittsfield, Massachusetts), in which he promised to paint likenesses and profiles over the following weeks in his room at Clarke's Tavern. A doctor in Pine Plains, New York, Cornelius Allerton was forty-two years old when Phillips painted him (1946.394). In an accompanying portrait of his widowed mother, the severe, wrinkled Mrs. Allerton wears a stiff bonnet, denoting her age. Both are shown with identifying symbols associated with their work, with Mrs. Allerton holding the Gospel Herald , an evangelical newspaper published in New York City between 1820 and 1827. In contrast, Cornelius holds a volume of Parr's Medical Dictionary on his lap, and his saddled horse appears in the distant background, ready to go at a moment's notice. As a pair—a man of science, out in the world; and a plain woman of religion—they represent the separate spheres of men and women in the nineteenth century.

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