Erastus salisbury field biography of martin

  • Erastus Field showed an early talent for sketching portraits, and in the aspiring artist traveled to New York City to study with Samuel FB Morse.
  • Born in the central Massachusetts town of Leverett, Field grew up on a farm.
  • Erastus Salisbury Field was an American 19th Century painter who was born in Numerous key galleries and museums such as D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts.

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    Continuing a major series on American Folk Art featuring 21 postings. Folk Art encompasses art produced by artists and ordinary folk with little or no training in the arts, and is traditionally utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic. The period I&#;m covering is the C18th and C19th.
    See parts also for earlier works.

    Note: Follow me on Twitter for notice of updates @poulwebb

    This is part 13 of a part post on American Folk Art:


    Erastus Salisbury Field ()

    Erastus Salisbury Field, s.
    Daguerrotype coloured by the artist

    Erastus Salisbury Field and his twin sister, Salome, were born in Leverett, Massachusetts, on 19 May Erastus Field showed an early talent for sketching portraits, and in the aspiring artist travelled to New York City to study with Samuel F. B. Morse. Field's instruction was cut short by the death of Morse's wife in , and it is not evident what Field learned. In he married Phebe Gilmur in Ware, Massachusetts, and their only chil

  • erastus salisbury field biography of martin

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    About , after the death of his wife, Erastus Salisbury Field set aside his busy portrait-painting practice in Ware, Massachusetts, and began creating religious and historical pictures. Although his brief period of training with painter Samuel F. B. Morse [] in New York no doubt exposed him to the conventions of high-style history painting, Field’s own works in the genre were highly idiosyncratic and reflected his increasingly eccentric personality. Although Field’s neighbors are reputed to have marveled at the extraordinary and often gargantuan pictures he created, his work seldom found a market, and many of his canvases were found stacked up against the walls of his studio—little more than a shack—when he died.
    The Garden of Eden (which exists in two versions; the second is at the Shelburne Museum, Vermont) was among the first of Field’s biblical subjects. Although based to some degree on paintings of the Genesis creation story by such well-known artists as the British romantic pa

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    Erastus Salisbury Field

    (–).

    Painter. After first concentrating on portraits, in the s he began to picture religious and historical subjects, which became his specialty in the mids. His masterpiece, the 9 × foot Historical Monument of the American Republic (Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts, –88) presents a synoptic view of the nation's history from its founding through the post–Civil War years. More than simulated reliefs adorning ten fanciful towers recount American history from its earliest times as a colony through the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of Conceived in mystical, rather than documentary terms, the work treats the American experience as a struggle between iniquity and redemption, reflecting the beliefs of Field's Calvinist upbringing. Born in the central Massachusetts town of Leverett, Field grew up on a farm. In he went to New York, where he studied for a few months with Samuel F. B. Morse. After returning to Leverett the following year, he became