POSSIBLY THE HOLMES FAMILY OF BOSTON

Powerful with a grandiose presence, the present portraits are a unique example of Erastus Salisbury Field as there are seemingly no other known pairs of double portraits by the artist. Born in Leverett, Massachusetts in 1805, Field was largely self-taught. He traveled to New York to study with Samuel F.B. Morse (1791-1872) for a brief period of time, and then he began a successful career working primarily in the Connecticut and Massachusetts regions. His early portraits, like the present lot, exhibit boldly scaled figures that fill the canvas and are often surrounded by a grey cloud-like background. He employs a Corinthian column to frame the composition and to act as a way to mirror the portraits. The portraits exhibit Field’s trademark characteristics with the sitters’ pointed ears, narrow shoulders and fingers with pink knuckles. He documented their social status and refinement by highlighting the expensive fabrics and jewelry. Here, Field paints the mother in a luxurious brocade silk dress with an elaborate lace collar. She also sits on a chair with arms that terminate in carved scrolls and draped in red fabric, a repeated feature in several of Field’s portraits.

The sitters in these portraits are most likely Cyrus Wheeler Holmes (1801-1891), his wife, Martha Langford Reynolds (1802-1877) and their two eldest children, Cyrus Wheeler Holmes, Jr. (1824-1891) and Nancy Mary Holmes (1826-1892). They have been identified from information that descended with the portraits and further corroborated by independent evidence. Family tradition maintained that the sitters were members of the Holmes family of Boston with the adult subjects the grandparents of Edith Holmes, wife of General Armando Mola. On Valentine’s Day in 1899, Edith Holmes (1877-1962) married then Lieutenant Armando Mola (1874-1961) of the Italian army in Washington D.C., an “international event” that was widely covered in the social pages of the local and national press (see for example, The Evening Star, Washington D.C., 28 January 1899, p. 7; Kansas City Journal, 16 February 1899, p. 13).

Given the approximate date of the portraits, the husband and wife sitters are most likely Edith’s great-grandparents. Cyrus Wheeler Holmes (1801-1891) and Martha Langford Reynolds (1802-1877). Cyrus and Martha hailed from Stonington, Connecticut and Wickford, Rhode Island respectively, but had moved to Monson, Massachusetts prior to 1830. The birthdates and genders of their two eldest children, Cyrus Wheeler Holmes, Jr. (1824-1891) and Nancy Mary Holmes (1826-1892), make them, plausible candidates for the boy and girl depicted in these works. Cyrus Wheeler Holmes, Jr., Edith’s grandfather, later lived and shortly after his father, died in Boston, the city associated with the sitters according to family lore. Located in central Massachusetts, Monson is approximately thirty miles from Field’s hometown of Leverett, and just over ten miles from Ware, where the artist married in 1825. Field is known to have painted family members during his early years and the commission of this special pair of double-portraits may have resulted from extended family associations as the likely girl in this portrait, Nancy Mary Holmes, later married the artist’s second cousin, Rev. Levi Alpheus Field (1821-1859).