부산대학교 도서관

(b Freetown, MA, Feb 2, 1770; d Duxbury, MA, Oct 13, 1822). American painter and physician. He may have been apprenticed to ship-carvers and decorators, but he was not trained in fine art. His earliest known portrait, Lady with her Pets (1790; New York, Met.), demonstrates his unsophisticated, decorative style. Between 1790 and 1796 he seems to have worked as an itinerant artist; only portraits of relatives and friends survive. During his life he painted at least 25 portraits as well as miniatures, views and decorative overmantels. He also painted a genre subject, the Welch Curate, c. 1800 (see Valentine and Little, p. 641), which was freely adapted from an English mezzotint. He carved the frames for some of his paintings. From 1796 he studied medicine and established himself as a physician in Duxbury, MA. Hathaway communicated a sense of the sitter’s individual character in his portraits. His style represented the culmination of the American limner tradition in which a simplified but recognizable facial likeness surmounts a conventionalized figure. He combined this method with an awareness of contemporary academic practice in portraiture, which he may have gained from prints or from works by John Smibert and John Singleton Copley seen in Boston. Since the 1930s his portraits have been admired for exemplifying the strength of design found in the work of many untrained American painters....