Portraits in the Grand Style, Just a Little Skewed

Correction Appended

Old Lyme

It is a very strange painting. An innocent-looking little boy with manly features wears a night slip and shoes and stands in an abbreviated landscape, holding a bird on a string. Late afternoon light bathes the surrounding hillside, which is strangely low and wildly out of scale — the young boy towers over trees and dwarfs distant mountains. He looks like a giant.

John Brewster Jr. (1766-1854) painted “Francis O. Watts With Bird” in Kennebunk, Me., for a wealthy couple in 1805. It is typical of the portraits he was commissioned to paint across New England in the closing decade of the 18th century and early years of the 19th.

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