Exhibition Opening: Portraits of Americans from the Morse Collection

Portraiture in America in the latter half of the 19th century and early part of the 20th century took on a different purpose. Rather than romantic portrayals of royals and magnates, paintings of people who commissioned portraits showed qualities beyond the physical attributes of their subjects. John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), Charles Hawthorne (1872–1930), and Cecilia Beaux (1855–1942) were portraitists that let the paint express the individual’s character and who did not simply reproduce the subject’s likeness on canvas. Portraits from the Morse Museum’s American painting collection are part of its repository of American art from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.