Paintings Worth Looking At

What's your favorite Joseph Whiting Stock portrait? Maybe his charming niece and nephew? How about the one he painted after his death? - - - The girl on the left was sold as “Attributed to Joseph Whiting Stock (American, 1815-1855)” with much pomp and circumstance. It provides some wonderful catalog copy analyzing Stock’s difficulty with perspective, which I’m still very fond of, even if the attribution is dead wrong. Pun not intended. Guess what: the auction record for the identical companion portrait, the girl on the right , surfaced recently.

In which a name is more than it seems. Recently, I found myself wandering through the expansive Massachusetts Five Colleges Database. I punched in a search for “Portrait,” just to see what happened. Nearly 4500 records were found ; I paged through every single one of them. (Yes, really. Some, I'm afraid, are better than others.) This appealing portrait quickly became one of my favorites. Painted by the folk portraiture master Joseph Goodhue Chandler, it depicts Mary Lyon (1797-1849), the pioneering female educator and founder of Mount Holyoke College. It’s a very likable image, full of warmth and sincerity alongside that classic New England austerity. (Thanks to Emily Wood, assistant Curator of Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in South Hadley, MA), for the high-resolution images of both paintings, and for additional context and information!)