Portrait Miniature of Elizabeth Adams, Attributed to Moses B. Russell, Boston, c.1840s

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A portrait miniature of a young-faced woman identified as Elizabeth Adams, painted within a cut-corner rectangular format against a striated … Read more A portrait miniature of a young-faced woman identified as Elizabeth Adams, painted within a cut-corner rectangular format against a striated reddish-orange ground that darkens toward the corners and forms a halo around the head. She wears a black dress with a scalloped lace bertha collar, a small gold brooch at the throat, and a lace day cap tied under the chin, her dark hair centre-parted and smoothed over the ears. The costume and hair place the sitting in the early-to-mid 1840s.

The sitter is identified by a pencil inscription in a later family hand on the original paper backing: "Elizabeth Adams, born in Medway, Feb. 20, 1808." She is very likely the Elizabeth Adams of Medway, Massachusetts, recorded as marrying James Barrows of Boston at Medfield on May 2, 1836, and identified in family genealogies as a daughter of Horatio Adams and Elizabeth Harding. The Medway Adamses descend from Henry Adams of Braintree, the immigrant ancestor of the presidential family, through his son Edward, who settled neighbouring Medfield in the seventeenth century. The couple's children were born in Boston in 1841 and 1843, placing her in the city during the years the costume dates the portrait and during Russell's most active period. She died at Peru, Maine, in 1900 at the age of 92, and the miniature appears to have descended in the Maine branch of the family.

The striated ground and halo, the large pale eyes, the finely rendered lace, and the rectangular cut-corner format are hallmarks of the Boston studio of Moses B. Russell (1809–1884) and his wife Clarissa Peters Russell; a signed Russell of c.1840 showing a woman in a black dress, lace collar and cap under a gilt mat is a close published comparable. Adult sitters were his usual work, and the piece is offered as attributed to Moses B. Russell. It is unsigned, so the attribution cannot be confirmed.

The miniature is laid on its original paper backing, which the painter used as a palette; the front of the card carries his colour tests in the same orange and grey-green as the background. It is presented under a gilt mat with a cut-corner opening in its bookmatched mahogany veneer frame with deep canted sides and mitred corners, retaining an old brass hanging ring to the back. See less