The unidentified subjects of these portraits were painted during the period judged to be Erastus Salisbury Field’s most successful, from the mid-1830s until the mid-1840s. Their fresh faces, with clear gazes and heightened color in the cheeks, are set against soft taupe backgrounds that emanate in light, cloudlike formations to an almost black shade in opposing corners. The strong features of the gentleman’s face are accentuated by the contrast with his pale yellow vest, white shirtfront, and black stock. He holds a quill in one hand, which hangs over the back of the rosewood-grained Empire chair in a manner reminiscent of the convention used so effectively by Ammi Phillips. The corner of a table, on which lies a sheet of paper, edges off the opposite side of the canvas.

Erastus Salisbury Field is one of the handful of folk portrait painters known to have studied, even briefly, with an academic artist. In 1824, he began an apprenticeship with Samuel F.B. Morse that was cut tragically short just three months later by the sudden death of Morse’s young wife. Even in that short time, Field was exposed to techniques, ideas, and genres, such as history painting, that had an enduring influence on him throughout his career. In 1825, Field returned to his native Leverett, Massachusetts, where he cultivated a pattern of patronage among relatives and friends that took him throughout western Massachusetts, Connecticut, eastern New York, and Vermont. In 1831, Field married Phebe Gilmur, of Ware, Massachusetts, and a year later their daughter Henrietta was born. By the mid-1830s, Field had developed the painting style for which he is celebrated today, with loose brushwork, attention to detail, and well-defined faces with modeling achieved through dabs of color, set in atmospheric backgrounds.

In 1841, Field returned to New York City, where he may have learned the process of taking daguerreotypes. After his return to New England in 1848, he began using daguerreotypes as the basis for painted portraits, sometimes creating composites from several photographic sources. In 1859, Field’s wife died, and he and his daughter moved to Plumtrees, near Leverett. It was here that he built a painting studio and started the series of religious and historical paintings that were to be the major preoccupation of his remaining years, culminating in his Historical Monument of the American Republic. A staunch abolitionist, the thirteen-foot-long painting was an allegorical architectural representation of major chapters in American history, with an emphasis on the Civil War. Shortly before his death in 1900 at the age of ninety-five, Field was remembered as the oldest citizen of Franklin County and an “all-around painter of the old school . . . his likenesses of people of past generations are as nearly correct as can well be made in oil.”

Stacy C. Hollander, "Man Holding Quill," in American Anthem: Masterworks from the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 329.