An itinerant portrait painter, William Jennys traveled throughout New England seeking commissions. In 1803, he was in Rutland, Vermont, where the prosperous attorney Cephas Smith, Jr., hired him to paint portraits of himself and his young wife and child [1974.136]. The portraits were among Jennys’s most ambitious works. Although he was known for small half-length likenesses, here he returned to a larger three-quarter-length format. These had been popular in the materialistic 1760s and 1770s because the bigger canvases allowed for the inclusion of furnishings, draperies, and other indications of wealth. Mr. Smith sits at his writing desk, pen in hand, demonstrating that he is a successful man of affairs.


This text was adapted from Carol Troyen and Janet L. Comey, Amerikakaigakodomo no sekai [Children in American art], exh. cat. (Nagoya, Japan: Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 2007).

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