Object details
Object number
P17w31
Creator(s)
Joseph Blackburn
(England, about 1730 - about 1778, London)
Title
A Lady of the Russell Family
Date
1754-1764
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
123 x 93 cm (48 7/16 x 36 5/8 in.)
Provenance
Bequeathed by Judge Chambers Russell (1713-1766), Lincoln (as a portrait of his grandmother, Rebecca Patefield Chambers, 1657-1735) to his brother James Russell (1715-1798), Lincoln, 1766 (?).
Bequeathed by James Russell to one of his two daughters, Mary Russell (1753-1806) or Sarah Russell (1750-1819) on 1 May 1804 (?). Mary bequeathed her estate to Sarah on 26 August 1806.
Presumably bequeathed by Sarah Russell to Samuel Pickering Gardner (1767-1843), Boston, a relative through his wife Rebecca Russell Lowell Gardner (1779-1853) and one of the executors named in her will, on 10 November 1819.
Passed by descent (as a portrait of Rebecca Chambers Russell, 1691-1729, by John Smibert, 1684-1751) to Isabella Stewart Gardner's husband, John L. Gardner, Jr. (1837-1898), 1884.
Commentary
The woman in this painting is an ancestor of Jack Gardner—Isabella Stewart Gardner’s husband. The British itinerant artist Joseph Blackburn painted her during his time in Massachusetts, in the mid-1700s. Dressed in her finery, the sitter holds a spring nosegay of tulips and violets.
Bibliography
Lawrence Park. Joseph Blackburn: A Colonial Portrait Painter with a Descriptive List of his Works (Worcester, Massachusetts, 1923), p. 54, no. 76. (entitled "Unknown Woman"; as by Joseph Blackburn, about 1755)
Philip Hendy. Catalogue of Exhibited Paintings and Drawings (Boston, 1931), pp. 342-44, ill. (the sitter as Rebecca Chambers Russell; as by John Smibert, 1729)
Gilbert Wendel Longstreet and Morris Carter. General Catalogue (Boston, 1935), p. 134. (entitled "Portrait of a Lady"; as by John Smibert, 1754-1764)
Margaret M. Martin. "On the Codman House." The Fence Observer (18 July 1968), ill. (the sitter as possibly Margaret Chambers; as by Joseph Blackburn)
Philip Hendy. European and American Paintings in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 1974), pp. 27-29, ill. (entitled "A Lady of the Russel Family (?)"; as by Joseph Blackburn)
Margaret M. Martin. "Letters from the Past: The Woman Behind the Man." Concord Journal (22 August 1985), p. 4, ill. (the sitter as believed to be Mary Russel; as by Joseph Blackburn)
Margaret M. Martin. The Chambers-Russell-Codman House and Family in Lincoln, Massachusetts (Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1996), np, ill. (the sitter as Rebecca Patefield Chambers; as by Joseph Blackburn)
Jenny Pore, "The Spirit of Violets," Inside the Collection (blog), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 11 June 2024, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/spirit-violets
Gallery
Short Gallery
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