Harriet Leavens (1802-1830)

Phillips was an itinerant, self-taught painter who spent much of his career traveling through small towns in the Berkshires and the Connecticut River Valley. An able marketer, he promoted his portraits in local newspapers as having been done “in a correct style” with “perfect shadows and elegant dresses in the prevailing fashion of the day.” This portrait, among the most celebrated and widely recognized works in Phillips’s oeuvre, depicts the eldest daughter of the Leavens family of Lansingburgh, New York. She is portrayed as a slender, stylish young woman dressed in a gown in the Empire style, which was adopted from France. With its simple geometries and pastel palette punctuated by flashes of blue, orange, and red, the portrait looks forward to the modernist abstractions of the early twentieth century. Phillips’s work held particular appeal for American painters of that era.