Mrs. Noah Smith and Her Children

Descended from farmers in Worcester County, Massachusetts, Earl was a highly trained portraitist who tempered his style to suit his rural subjects. After seven years of study in London, Earl became an itinerant artist in Connecticut and Vermont; he devised a manner of painting that betrayed his knowledge of fashionable English portraiture while appealing to his clients’ restrained tastes and pious values. A key example is this complex group portrait of Chloe Burrall Smith (1757–1810) and her five children, a grand and stylish work executed in Bennington, Vermont, in a simple technique and a vivid palette of greens and reds. (Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art)