American Art Collaborative

Waist-length portrait of Elizabeth Baynton Markoe (1807-1886), who married William Masters Camac in 1829. She is shown with straight black hair, parted in the center, wearing a low-cut red velvet dress with short sleeves trimmed with lace. She has one long strand of pearls around her neck, and a yellow scarf draped over her lower arms. When the sitter's husband died in 1842 (he is portrayed in the pendant portrait-miniature WAM 38.469) Elizabeth was left a wealthy widow. She lived on an estate four or five miles outside Philadelphia, which the landscape architect A.J. Downing praised, especially the conservatory and lawns. The house is illustrated in Downing's "Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North American" (2nd edition, 1844). The frame is not original and is later than the portrait.