Collections record Beta

Oil Painting - "Adella and Mary Louise Hurlbut"

2014-15-1

Oil on canvas portrait of Adella and Mary Louise Hurlbut of Goshen, CT. Painting shows two young girls in a formal pose. One girl with chin length dark hair is seated and wears an 1860s style pink dress. The other girl stands beside the other with her hand on the sitter's shoulder. The girl standing also has chin length dark hair and wears a tan colored 1860s style dress. A deep red curtain is drawn behind the girls on one side. A landscape scene with rolling hills and a weeping willow are seen behind the girls beyond the curtain. The portrait is signed "A. Sheldon Pennoyer" in black in bottom right corner. "Frances Adella and Mary Louise Hurlbut" written in artist's hand in pencil on back of canvas stretcher.

This portrait depicts Adella and Mary Louise Hurlbut of Goshen, CT as young girls in the 1860s, but was painted in the 20th century in the style of 19th-century portraiture and portrait photography. Della (1853-1926) and Lizzie (1855-1915), as they were known, were born in Goshen, CT to Frederick E. Hurlbut and Mary Hurlbut. Della and Lizzie's sister Mae Grace Hurlbut Clark (1876 - ) was living in Litchfield, CT at the time Pennoyer was working in the community. It is likely that she had the portrait copied from an original or painted based on a photograph of the girls.

Albert Sheldon Pennoyer was born in Oakland, California, on April 5, 1888. He studied briefly at the University of California moving to Paris in 1912 to study architecture. The following year he gave up architecture and instead took up painting and studied at the Académie Julian and Académie de la Grand Chaumiére. He returned to the United States at the onset of World War I, and served from 1917 to 1920 in the camouflage unit of the Army Corps of Engineers, and then from 1920 to 1928 in the Officers’ Reserve Corp. In 1921, Pennoyer set up a studio in New York City where he would work at regular intervals for the next thirty-eight years. Pennoyer also spent large amounts of time at his mother’s home in Litchfield, producing Connecticut landscapes in pastel and oil and multiple scenes of Litchfield, both past and present. Pennoyer served again in World War II, first with the U.S. Army Air Force and the Corps of Engineers before joining the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA, better known as the Monuments Men). Given a Leica camera, a car, and a driver, Pennoyer was involved in the repair, recovery, and documentation of cultural heritage in Italy from 1943-1945. Pennoyer assisted in the recovery and return of artwork evacuated from public collections by Italian officials and storage in safer repositories in the Tuscan countryside. His photographs document the work of the MFAA, the destruction of monuments and buildings caused by German occupation and allied bombing, and the physical and emotional toll felt by the residents.

• Pennoyer, Albert Sheldon, 1887-1957

Framed 24"w x 28"h

• oil
• paint
• canvas
• wood