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Ad Code: 3
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from Auction House Records.
Profile bust portrait of a rosy-cheeked young boy
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  Ruth
Henshaw Bascom was born in Leicester, Massachusetts. Her life and
career as a portraitist are exceptionally well documented, owing to the
existence of the 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.
Sources include:
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.
Retrieved from: Sotheby's New York |
This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  A painter of life-size profile portraits of neighbors and relatives in
Massachusetts, she was truly an original in her techniques and was in
her mid-forties when she began to paint. Because she was a
'lady,' she had no interest in taking money for her portraits.
She
did her likenesses by having the model cast a shadow upon a piece of
paper that she traced and then colored with pastel. From there,
her work became a kind of collage or assemblage because she glued on
shiny beads, attached tinfoil eyeglasses, and sometimes put charming
landscapes behind.
She was born in Leicester, Massachusetts, the
oldest of ten children whose father was an organizer of the Minutemen
during the Revolutionary War. She was raised in Worcester, and in
1804 married Dr. Asa Miles, a Dartmouth College professor who only
lived two years after the marriage. She then married Reverend
Ezekiel Bascom and moved to many locations in New England where he had
preaching assignments. Much of her work was done in Gill, Massachusetts.
The
journals she kept of her life are in the American Antiquarian Society
in Worcester, and among her notes is a method for painting a rug on a
floor.
Source:
American Women Artists by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein
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