Laura Brown

Anne Whitney opened a girls’ school in Salem, Massachusetts, when she was only twenty-five. Over the next two years, she made friends with a local shipowner, William Augustus Brown. Several years later, Brown commissioned Whitney to create a bust of his youngest daughter. Laura, or “Bee-Bee” as Whitney called her, was only two or three years old at the time of this portrait, and the artist captured her youthful innocence in the figure’s half-smile and plump features. (Tufts, American Women Artists, 1987)