National Gallery of Art

This full-length group portrait represents Harriet W. Lancashire White and her two children, Sarah Lancashire White and E. Laurence White Jr. Harriet W. Lancashire was born in 1884 in Saratoga Springs, New York, the eldest daughter of Dr. and Mrs. James H. Lancashire. In 1911 she married the investment banker Edward Laurence White of Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, and New York City.[1]  [1]
For biographical information on White, see Who Was Who in America, vol. 5, 1969–1973 (Chicago, IL, 1973), 773–774. Their daughter, Sarah White, was a member of the Vincent Club and Junior League of Boston; according to the New York Times she was “well known in New England riding and hunt circles.”[2]  [2]
“Mclennan–Houghton,” New York Times, Dec. 17, 1936. Their son, E. Laurence White Jr., graduated from Harvard College in 1941 and became a partner at Bassinette & White, a New York advertising firm. The artist, Lydia Field Emmet, was part of a groundbreaking generation of professional women portraitists in the Emmet family that included her older sister, Rosina Emmet Sherwood, and her younger cousin Ellen Emmet Rand. After studying with the American impressionist painter William Merritt Chase, Lydia went on to a highly successful and lucrative career as a society portraitist and was honored with numerous awards at national and international exhibitions.[3]  [3]
On Lydia and other women artists in the Emmet family, see Martha Hoppin, The Emmets: A Family of Women Painters (Pittsfield, MA, 1982). On these artists role in the broader context of American modernism, see Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2001), as well as Marian Wardle, ed., American Women Modernists: The Legacy of Robert Henri, 1910–1945 (New Brunswick, 2005).

In this work Emmet has portrayed Harriet White seated with her children on a red-cushioned bench. Harriet's simple black dress is stark against the decorative floral screen behind the group.[4]  [4]
The screen and ornately carved bench appear in numerous other works. The Four Daughters of Winthrop Aldrich (1927, The Museum of the City of New York), for instance, presents a more complete rendering of the screen. Placed just off-center in the composition, she is positioned on a slightly diagonal axis relative to the picture plane with her figure oriented toward the right. White’s daughter in her yellow dress and son in his sailor suit affectionately lean on and embrace their mother. The viewer seems to have intruded upon a quiet family gathering during which the mother was entertaining her children with the illustrated book that rests on her lap. Both mother and daughter look directly at the spectator, while the boy gazes off to the left as if something has momentarily captured his attention.

The painting is a not entirely resolved example of Emmet’s family group society portraiture. The spatial relationships of the sitters to their surroundings and to each other are not defined precisely. Their slightly melancholy expressions also imbue the image with an elusive, self-conscious quality that is absent, for instance, from the less complex, more clearly articulated Olivia.

Robert Torchia

August 17, 2018

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