Family Portrait of Charles and Comfort Caverly and Their Son Isaac

~Portraiture, the dominant form of painting in nineteenth-century America, offered a sense of not only how the subjects actually looked but also how they wanted to be seen by their peers and remembered by posterity. Affluent sitters, and increasingly members of the middling classes, commissioned portraits as an expression of social position and material aspirations....

~In 1836, when Charles and Comfort Caverly of New Hampshire had their portrait painted by the artist Joseph H. Davis, they gave some truth to a pronouncement made by the American critic and author John Neal a few years prior, regarding the development of artistic appreciation in the...