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Lot Essay
To The Patrons of the Fine Arts-
The Portrait Paintings by Mr. RALPH EARL, in this town, do him honor as an American, and as an artist of great taste and ingenuity... We cannot doubt, and hope, that in this age of refinement, the well-born and well-bred of his countrymen will patronize him in the road to Fame.
The Weekly Monitor, Litchfield, Connecticut, June 21, 1790.
Exceptional in both skill and scope, Ralph Earl's remarkable body of work was guided by the entrepreneurial spirit of the young American republic. By the 1790s, Earl had distinguished himself as the foremost portrait painter of the prosperous gentry in the Connecticut. Unlike other contemporaries, such as Philadelphia master Charles Willson Peale, who practiced their trade in a particular city, Earl worked as an itinerant painter with unrelenting ambition and drive, developing significant patronage across the Connecticut River Valley.
A Loyalist during the Revolutionary War, Earl lived in England from 1778-1785. There, he associated with other artists such as John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West and Sir Joshua Reynolds and adopted the more painterly, abstract style favored in England. Upon his return to America, Earl failed to establish himself as a studio artist in New York City and set off to pursue a traveling painting practice. The portraits from this period, the most successful and prolific in his career, incorporated the fashionable style he had learned in England into his linear, provincial portraits of the landed upper class in rural Connecticut. The combination of the urban sophistication evocative of English portraiture with the restrained, straightforward coloring and modeling of the figures appealed to the pietistic attitude of his sitters. Earl successfully conveyed his subjects' comfortable affluence in simple, sparing and temperate portraits (see Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic (New Haven, Connecticut, 1991), pp.33-38).
Executed in 1791, this full-length portrait of Nathaniel Shaw Woodbridge is the epitome of Earl's restrained Anglo-Saxon elegance and the prevailing image is one of unostentatious wealth and established position. Nathaniel stands with his rifle fresh from the hunt, one leg crossed in front of the other in a pose seen in fashionable European portraiture. His subtly patterned silk vest, buff silk breeches and silk stockings announce a man of affluence and status. His shirt ruffles are pleated muslin and the white linen cravat is tied fashionably a l'anglaise in a bow at the front. The buckles on his knee breeches and hanging seal fob are examples of jewelry worn by gentlemen in the eighteenth century. For a discussion of a related portrait, see Kornhauser, p. 152.
Nathaniel Shaw Woodbridge was born in 1771 to Reverend Ephraim Woodbridge, a prominent New London clergyman, and his wife, Mary Shaw. His maternal grandfather and namesake, Nathaniel Shaw, was a wealthy merchant who served as a naval agent for the Continental Army during the Revolution. After the premature death of his parents, Woodbridge and his sister, Lucretia, were cared for by their wealthy uncles, Thomas and Nathaniel Shaw. A descendant of one of the ten founders of Yale, Woodbridge entered the College in the winter of 1785-1786. However, his career at Yale was short, as Woodbridge's misdoings or "Tumults" led to his dismissal in June 1786 (Mary E. Perkins, Cronicles of a Connecticut Farm, 1769-1905 (Boston, 1905), p. 128).
In the 1780s, Thomas Shaw bought large tracts of land in Salem, Connecticut, south of the old Colchester-Lyme border. Formerly part of the confiscated estate of British Colonel William Browne, Thomas Shaw built a home for his nephew at White Oak Hill in Salem in 1791, a year after Nathaniel's marriage to Elizabeth Mumford, the daughter of a wealthy Salem estate manager.
Nathaniel died of consumption in 1797 at the young age of 26. In his obituary notice, it was said that "in the benevolent virtues of the heart as exercised in the husband, parent and friend, few have gone before him" (Perkins, 132). This portrait is listed is his estate inventory, drawn up in New London eight days before his death.
This portrait has descended directly through six generations of members of the Woodbridge and Ryerson families. The portrait was prominently displayed in Havenwood, the Lake Forest, Illinois home of Edward L. Ryerson (b. 1854), the husband of Mary Pringle Mitchell, the great granddaughter of Nathaniel Shaw Woodbridge.
The Portrait Paintings by Mr. RALPH EARL, in this town, do him honor as an American, and as an artist of great taste and ingenuity... We cannot doubt, and hope, that in this age of refinement, the well-born and well-bred of his countrymen will patronize him in the road to Fame.
The Weekly Monitor, Litchfield, Connecticut, June 21, 1790.
Exceptional in both skill and scope, Ralph Earl's remarkable body of work was guided by the entrepreneurial spirit of the young American republic. By the 1790s, Earl had distinguished himself as the foremost portrait painter of the prosperous gentry in the Connecticut. Unlike other contemporaries, such as Philadelphia master Charles Willson Peale, who practiced their trade in a particular city, Earl worked as an itinerant painter with unrelenting ambition and drive, developing significant patronage across the Connecticut River Valley.
A Loyalist during the Revolutionary War, Earl lived in England from 1778-1785. There, he associated with other artists such as John Singleton Copley, Benjamin West and Sir Joshua Reynolds and adopted the more painterly, abstract style favored in England. Upon his return to America, Earl failed to establish himself as a studio artist in New York City and set off to pursue a traveling painting practice. The portraits from this period, the most successful and prolific in his career, incorporated the fashionable style he had learned in England into his linear, provincial portraits of the landed upper class in rural Connecticut. The combination of the urban sophistication evocative of English portraiture with the restrained, straightforward coloring and modeling of the figures appealed to the pietistic attitude of his sitters. Earl successfully conveyed his subjects' comfortable affluence in simple, sparing and temperate portraits (see Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Ralph Earl: The Face of the Young Republic (New Haven, Connecticut, 1991), pp.33-38).
Executed in 1791, this full-length portrait of Nathaniel Shaw Woodbridge is the epitome of Earl's restrained Anglo-Saxon elegance and the prevailing image is one of unostentatious wealth and established position. Nathaniel stands with his rifle fresh from the hunt, one leg crossed in front of the other in a pose seen in fashionable European portraiture. His subtly patterned silk vest, buff silk breeches and silk stockings announce a man of affluence and status. His shirt ruffles are pleated muslin and the white linen cravat is tied fashionably a l'anglaise in a bow at the front. The buckles on his knee breeches and hanging seal fob are examples of jewelry worn by gentlemen in the eighteenth century. For a discussion of a related portrait, see Kornhauser, p. 152.
Nathaniel Shaw Woodbridge was born in 1771 to Reverend Ephraim Woodbridge, a prominent New London clergyman, and his wife, Mary Shaw. His maternal grandfather and namesake, Nathaniel Shaw, was a wealthy merchant who served as a naval agent for the Continental Army during the Revolution. After the premature death of his parents, Woodbridge and his sister, Lucretia, were cared for by their wealthy uncles, Thomas and Nathaniel Shaw. A descendant of one of the ten founders of Yale, Woodbridge entered the College in the winter of 1785-1786. However, his career at Yale was short, as Woodbridge's misdoings or "Tumults" led to his dismissal in June 1786 (Mary E. Perkins, Cronicles of a Connecticut Farm, 1769-1905 (Boston, 1905), p. 128).
In the 1780s, Thomas Shaw bought large tracts of land in Salem, Connecticut, south of the old Colchester-Lyme border. Formerly part of the confiscated estate of British Colonel William Browne, Thomas Shaw built a home for his nephew at White Oak Hill in Salem in 1791, a year after Nathaniel's marriage to Elizabeth Mumford, the daughter of a wealthy Salem estate manager.
Nathaniel died of consumption in 1797 at the young age of 26. In his obituary notice, it was said that "in the benevolent virtues of the heart as exercised in the husband, parent and friend, few have gone before him" (Perkins, 132). This portrait is listed is his estate inventory, drawn up in New London eight days before his death.
This portrait has descended directly through six generations of members of the Woodbridge and Ryerson families. The portrait was prominently displayed in Havenwood, the Lake Forest, Illinois home of Edward L. Ryerson (b. 1854), the husband of Mary Pringle Mitchell, the great granddaughter of Nathaniel Shaw Woodbridge.