2007_01_01_archive

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part seven

Sarah Goodridge (1788-1853) was born in a small village in

Massachussetts, the sixth of nine children. Growing up in the country,

she learned to draw by scratching pictures with a pin on birch bark.

Eventually she made her way to Boston where she earned a living

painting miniature portraits on ivory.

In the days before photography, such pictures were often worn in

lockets or pinned to lapels.

Goodridge's miniatures were very popular and she soon flourished as an

independent artist-- a rarity for a woman in colonial America. By

painting two or three portraits a week, she made enough to support her

sick mother, her orphan niece, and other family members. Her career

lasted for thirty years until her failing eyesight forced her to stop.

She never married.

Goodridge did, however, develop a special friendship with the handsome

young Boston lawyer Daniel Webster. The first time she painted

Webster's portrait, he was married with three children. He sat for

eleven more portraits over the next 25 years. Webster and Goodridge

wrote each other frequently; she carefully preserved letters from him,

while he seems to have carefully destroyed letters from her. When he

moved to Washington to serve in government she visited him there

twice.

After Webster's wife died in 1827, Goodridge secretly painted this

miniature for him entitled Beauty Revealed (self portrait):

Sarah's daring self-exposure was unthinkable in an era when modesty

was rigidly preserved by several layers of clothing. Her painting

crossed all kinds of boundaries-- societal, sexual, religious,

artistic and socioeconomic. John Updike describes this little jewel as

"the first known nude American portrait done from life" that has

survived.

No one can ever be certain what Webster and Goodridge shared in

private. Scholars have agreed that at a minimum, Goodridge's poignant

self-portrait communicates her "availability" to Webster (or, as

Updike wrote, "we are yours for the taking.")

Could an object so small ever carry greater weight? Sarah's offering

is not mere pigment on ivory. It shows how an artist invests a

physical object with deep significance, and through that object

reaches out to another human being. It reminds me of Walt Whitman's

impassioned attempt to use a poem to reach beyond his mortality and

touch some future reader who might be holding Leaves of Grass late at

night:

Now lift me close to your face till I whisper,

What you are holding is in reality no book,

nor part of a book;

It is a man, flush'd and full-blooded -- it is I -- So long!

We must separate awhile --

Here! take from my lips this kiss;

Whoever you are, I give it especially to you;

Whatever their private relationship, Webster was politically ambitious

and needed money, so Goodridge simply would not do for his second

wife. He met and promptly married another woman, whose sole

qualification seemed to be that she was from a wealthy and prominent

family.

When Goodridge died, she left Webster her beloved paint box.

As for Webster, he kept her tiny painting hidden amongst his personal

effects until the day he died. It was discovered by his heirs and was