American Art Collaborative

This boldly painted portrait is characteristic of the vigorous style of the forty-year artistic partnership of Samuel Lovett Waldo and William Jewett. After training at the Royal Academy in London from 1806 to 1809,Waldo returned to the U.S. and began a successful career as a portraitist and cultural figure in New York. Jewett-formerly apprenticed to a coach-maker-was first Waldo's apprentice and then his eventual employee and partner.While Waldo usually painted his subjects' heads and shoulders, Jewett normally concentrated on backgrounds. A larger, three-quarter length portrait of New Yorker William Elliott, with a more detailed background and different prop in the left hand, is in the collection of Yale University Art Gallery.