Elizabeth Fenimore Cooper

Date1816

MediumWatercolor on wove paper

DimensionsSight: 16 1/2 × 21 3/4 in. (41.9 × 55.2 cm)

Object numberN0145.1977

Credit LineCollection of the Fenimore Art Museum. Gift of Dr. Henry S. F. Cooper

Photograph by Richard Walker

Label TextBorn in 1781 in Rancocas, New Jersey, Elizabeth Fenimore married William Cooper in 1774, and reluctantly moved to her husband's new village of Cooperstown in 1790. After first settling his family in a small frame house, Cooper prospered and in 1799 moved his family into the newly built Otsego Hall, the largest brick house west of Albany. Freeman's painting depicts the large central hall that ran through the center of the structure. A family servant, Joseph Stewart, stands at the pantry doorway, while Mrs. Cooper's pots and boxes of exotic plants, said to include orange trees and crape myrtle, are grouped at the south end of the room. These were usually placed outside during the warmer months. However, this was a unique year. The eruptions of Tambora, a volcano in the eastern Indian Ocean, spewed so much ash into the atmosphere that the northeastern United States suffered cold weather and frosts throughout the summer.
Exhibition HistoryRediscovered Painters of Upstate New York, 1700-1875,” Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, June 14 – September 15, 1958; Rochester Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, NY, September 26 – October 21, 1958; Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, NY, October 30 – November 20, 1958; Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, NY, November 30 – December 21, 1958; Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts, Syracuse, NY, January 4 – January 25, 1959; New York Historical Society, New York, NY, February 1 – February 28, 1959.

“The River: People and Places,” The American Federation of Arts, New York State Fair, New York, NY, April 22 – October 31, 1964.

“American Art from Alumni Collections,” Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT, April 25 – June 16, 1968.

“What Is American in American Art,” M. Knoedler and Company, Inc., New York, NY, February 8 – March 6, 1971.

“Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art,” Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY, August 23 – December 31, 2008; New York State Museum, Albany, NY, September 9, 2009 – January 6, 2010.

“Art of the Everyman: American Folk Art from the Fenimore Art Museum,” Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT, May 28 – September 29, 2014.
ProvenanceDr. Henry S. F. Cooper, New York, New York (descendant of the sitter)
BibliographyJones, Agnes Halsey, Rediscovered Painters of Upstate New York, 1700 – 1875 (exh. cat. Utica, NY: Winchester Printing Incorporated, 1958), pp. 42, 44, cat. no. 37, ill.

James Franklin Beard, editor, The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper, vol. 1, (Cambridge, Mass.,1960), pl. IV, ill.

Keyes, Wilma, George Freeman, Miniaturist, 1789-1868, (Stors, CT: History Workshop of the Mansfield Historical Society, 1980), pp. 17, 58, ill.

Garrett, Elizabeth Donaghy, “The American Home,” in Antiques CXXVIII (December, 1985), p. 1218, pl. V, ill.

American Art from Alumni Collections (exh. cat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1968), cat. no. 60, ill.

Emans, Charlotte M., “Instead of Roses and Buttercups, There Were Snow and Ice,” in Heritage (July/August, 1986), pp. 20, back cover, ill.

D’Ambrosio, Paul S. and Charlotte M. Emans, Folk Art’s Many Faces: Portraits in the New York State Historical Association (Cooperstown, NY: NYSHA, 1987), pp. 83-85, 45, 83, ill.

Ljungquist, Kent, Dictionary of Literary Biography Volume 250: Antebellum Writers in New York (Detroit, MI: Gale Research, Inc., 2001), p. 104, ill.

Sorin, Gretchen Sullivan and Mary C. Aimonoovitch, Through the Eyes of Others, African Americans and Identity in American Art (exh. cat. Cooperstown, NY: Fenimore Art Museum, 2008), pp. 24, 25, ill.

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