Samuel Stillman Osgood Sold at Auction Prices

SAMUEL STILLMAN OSGOOD, Massachusetts/California, 1808-1880, Portrait of Anna Quincy Thaxter Parsons., Oil on canvas, 30" x 25". Fra...

SAMUEL STILLMAN OSGOOD Massachusetts/California, 1808-1880 Portrait of Anna Quincy Thaxter Parsons. Unsigned. Provenance: Northeast Auctions, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, November 5, 2005, Lot #308. A New Hampshire Collection of Paintings. Boston-born Samuel Osgood painted this portrait of Anna after 1831. In 1830, Osgood, a former sailor, survived a ship afire 350 miles off the American coast. In 1831 he returned to Boston from study in England and started painting portraits there in earnest, submitting "Portrait of a Lady" in both 1831 and 1832 to the Boston Athenaeum exhibitions. Anna was the daughter of Anna Quincy Thaxter (1791-1879) and Nehemiah Parsons (1773-1848), a former mariner and merchant on Boston's Long Wharf. Anna was a clairvoyant, whose specialty was reading a person's character, often just from a letter. She was also a women's rights activist who regularly visited Brook Farm, the utopian commune in Roxbury, where some artists and many of Boston's intellectuals lived in the 1840s. Anna and her mother and several sisters were early hikers in the White Mountains and they are credited with naming Cathedral Ledge, Echo Lake and White Horse Ledge, well-known sites in the area that were painted by White Mountain School landscape artists. Anna was a friend of Samuel Stillman Osgood's wife, the poet Frances Osgood, and their letters to one another survive. Sadly, Samuel and Fanny lost their young daughters within a short time. Fanny, too, died young. The family's touching gravesite at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, includes a monument with a lyre with broken strings representing each lost soul. Anna is also buried at Mt. Auburn. Oil on canvas, 30" x 25". Framed 41" x 36".