Posted Monday morning, September 28, 2020.
Detail from “The Healy Garden, Paris (with portraits of his wife Louisa and daughter Edith)” by George Peter Alexander Healy”. 1877. Via Christchurch Art Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand.
In our day, and in his own day too---he lived from 1813 and 1894 and was a famous and successful painter for all of about three-quarters of that time, working mostly in Paris---the American artist George Peter Alexander Healy is and was known as a painter of portraits of the rich, famous, and politically powerful. Among his most enduring works is his portrait of the youthful, still beardless Abraham Lincoln the year before he became president. But Healy was prolific and industrious and he painted whatever caught his eye...or captured his heart. And in this quiet scene he painted the heart of his happy family.
Between commissions he painted his own portrait and one of [his wife] Louisa, then another of Louisa and daughter Edith sitting in the garden, Edith knitting while Louisa read aloud to her. Healy, too, loved to listen to Louisa read from Dickens, or Balzac, or George Sand while he worked. If she were away or for some other reason unable to read, he would turn gloomy. “I go every morning and read...to Papa, but...that is not what Mama’s reading is, so he looks rather glum,” Edith wrote in her diary.
---from “The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris” by David McCullough.
This is a lovely story. Thanks for sharing it.
Posted by: Bill Wolfe | Tuesday, October 06, 2020 at 01:36 AM