Sarah Poulterer Harrison

American, 1817 - 1906

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Shown from the chest up, an older man with pale, peachy skin, wearing a high-collared black coat and a cream-white, ruffled collar, is shown against a deep wine-red background in this vertical portrait painting. His body is angled to our right and he turns his face to look at us with gray eyes under pale gray eyebrows. He has a hooked nose and jowls along his chin line. His cheeks are flushed and his lips are set in a line. His white hair flares out along the sides of his head and is tied at the nape of his neck with a ribbon loosely painted and outlined with black. His ink-black coat has silvery gray highlights along the high collar and his right shoulder, to our left. The background is painted with light brushstrokes, deepening from scarlet red around his face to black at the upper corners.
Gilbert Stuart, George Washington (Vaughan portrait), 1795, oil on canvas, Andrew W. Mellon Collection, 1942.8.27

George Washington (Vaughan portrait)

Gilbert Stuart · 1795 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1942.8.27

Rembrandt Peale, Thomas Sully, 1859, oil on canvas board, Gift of Leland Harrison, 1955.2.1

Thomas Sully

Rembrandt Peale · 1859 · oil on canvas board ·  Accession ID  1955.2.1

A turreted, sprawling stone castle, bronzed by the setting sun, crowns a rocky cliff at the center of this horizontal landscape painting. A round turret rises in the center of the castle’s jumble of blocky, square buildings. The buildings are dramatically outlined against a mass of roiling charcoal-gray and indigo-blue clouds, which are edged in peach, in the upper right corner. Barely noticeable amid the hulking structure, a scarlet-red flag flutters from a window in the tower overlooking a distant crag to our right. On that distant mountain, a column of amber smoke rises to mingle with the clouds above a bright band of sunlight on the horizon. Low trees and bushes grow around the base of the battlements. The land dips steeply toward us to a river below the cliff. Through the tangle of trees, a dirt road winds down the hill to a bridge of pale stone that crosses the river in front of us, to our left of center. Groups of helmeted horsemen cross the bridge, passing under a stone archway at its center. Near the bridge, tiny in scale, a herd of goats capers on the road near the horsemen as they ride on in a double column coming toward us along the clay-brown road. One rider carries a red pennant fluttering in the breeze. The riders wear ruby-red tunics and carry upright lances and shields. Light glints off their armor and helmets as they head to our right, toward the dark mass of tangled trees and rocky cliff on the border of the picture. A copse of low, gnarled trees grows near the opposite edge of the painting, to our left. Behind these trees and riders stretches a river valley spanned by another stone bridge. A cluster of people can barely be seen near and along that massive bridge in the distance. Beyond, buildings and a tall, square tower are lit by fires belching clouds of smoke. A heavy bank of gray clouds obscures the rest of the valley. Birds soar in the mist near a distant cliff, where flames and more smoke rise behind a boulder. In the deep distance to our left, a high, craggy cliff topped by a sprinkling of snow surges above the blanket of fog and clouds. In front of a clear, blue sky, it is also bathed in coral-red by the setting sun.
Jasper Francis Cropsey, The Spirit of War, 1851, oil on canvas, Avalon Fund, 1978.12.1

The Spirit of War

Jasper Francis Cropsey · 1851 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1978.12.1

Bibliography

1933

  • Malone, Dumas, ed. Dictionary of American Biography. 20 vols. New York, 1943: VIII: 345-346.

1972

  • Wainwright, Nicholas B. "Joseph Harrison, Jr., a forgotten art collector." Antiques 102 (October 1972): 660-668.