Mary Way (1769-1833)
Portrait of Peter Richards, 1780s
Watercolor on silk with paper collage,
2 3/4 x 2 1/2”
Unsigned

Mary Way of New London is one of America’s earliest professional women artists. In the 1780s, she specialized in miniature watercolor portraits on paper or silk, which she usually “dressed” with cloth scraps or, as in these examples, with painted paper, applied as in a collage. These sitters -- Peter (b. 1778) and Nathaniel (b. 1780) -- were children of Guy Richards, Jr., of New London. They were still babies when Benedict Arnold’s forces devastated the city in 1781. The family business was burned, and their home was saved only because the boys’ sister lay ill inside.

See miniatures of their parents and Ralph Earl’s portrait of their grandmother elsewhere in the exhibition.