American School/Boston, early 19th c., "Harriet Beecher (1811-1896; after 1836, Harriet Beecher Stowe)", c. 1826-27 or after, watercolor and gouache on ivory, apparently uninscribed, but with 19th c. handwritten identification on printed card-label en verso ("Mrs. [repeated/ Harriet Beecher - Stowe/ - Boston- "), sight 3 7/8 in. x 2 7/8 in., (support approximately 4 3/4 in. x 3 3/4 in.), in an elaborately carved mid-19th c. giltwood frame. E4000-6000 Provenance: Private collection, England. Note: The young Harriet Elizabeth Beecher on the eve of her fifteenth birthday and after completing school in her native Connecticut, traveled to Boston, to take up residence with her clergyman father Lyman Beecher and his second wife (her own mother Roxana Foote Beecher, having died when Harriet was only five). She remained in Boston from approximately the late spring of 1826 to about the same season in 1827, as the only residence she ever made in that city; she then returned to Connecticut to teach in her sister Catherine's Hartford Female Seminary-mainly the subjects of the standard curriculum (including those normally reserved for young men), but also drawing and painting, which she herself had pursued as a student there, and in which she continued to develop appropriate skills as a teacher. Harriet's mother Roxana Beecher had studied art with an accomplished master from New York, and had become a capable painter of miniatures on ivory: in the transition from student to teacher that was occupying Harriet during her sojourn in Boston, and in a succeeding stay with her maternal grandmother, she valued Roxana's "little works of ingenuity, and taste, and skill, which had been wrought by her hand", as tangible reminders of her mother's talent. As Harriet wrote in this period to her Grandmother Foote, "I admire to cultivate a taste for painting, and I wish to improve it; it was what my dear mother admired and loved, and I cherish it for her sake" (Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, Oxford, 1994, pp. 15, 52, 53). The discovery of this surprising miniature seems to bear out every element of Harriet Beecher's emerging self-awareness during her residence of 1826-1827 in Boston. A later 19th-c. label ( plausibly written by a member of her family, who recognized that this image would have shown the sitter under her maiden name of Harriet Beecher, but who added the then familiar "Stowe" after a small dash, as well as her later married title "Mrs." not once but twice), unquestioningly asserts that this painting pertains to "Boston"-a city rich in professional miniaturists, and one in which Harriet never lived except over the course of her sixteenth year, an age that manifestly agrees with the depiction of this subject. Not only that privileged information of a Boston sojourn (which probably no one outside the family would have known, before the publication of Hedrick's authoritative biography), but also the crucial accoutrements of a magnifying glass being held for the study of a nearby miniature, and the look of devotion on the daughter's face, all combine to make this a remarkably accurate representation of a young woman at the transition from adolescence to maturity, who is somewhat poignantly finding her own way in the world, in serious part through the attentive study of her late mother's miniatures. Harriet Beecher had moreover recently made a major commitment to pro-active Christianity, and the discreet gold cross of that "calling" is conspicuously seen in the circlet around her neck. This painting's inclusion of her jewelry, together with her modish Empire-style gown and disarmingly direct gaze might perhaps be said to hint at a worldliness at odds with the earnest daughter of a New England parson; but her Grandmother Foote- for whom this captivating image may well have been painted-was the matriarch of a conspicuously more liberal Episcopalian family, in which for example modern Romantic novels and poetry were much prized. This unexpectedly revelatory image, therefore, presents a striking image of self-discovery in a similarly idealized (or Romanticized) vein, while also paying filial homage to the artistic legacy of a departed mother. This painting's proposed identification as a portrait of the sitter at age fifteen, in 1826, would make it by a margin of almost a quarter of a century the earliest known professional likeness of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Heretofore her first portrait (apart from a provincial profile silhouette, made by a family amateur) has been thought to be a beautiful daguerreotype in the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Southworth and Hawes, probably made in 1850 during the Stowes' brief stopover in Boston to acquire furnishings, while en route to Brunswick, Maine. That early photograph, interestingly, shows Stowe in an almost identical pose, with the same features and coiffure, in the same relationship to a colorfully draped table at her left elbow- almost as if it were a conscious reprise of this youthful image.