Mrs. Elizabeth Wurtz Elder and Her Three Children

The career of portraitist Jacob Eichholtz exemplifies the flexibility and determination required by artists of the young republic. Although originally a metalworker in his native Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Eichholtz was encouraged to pursue painting by his contemporary Thomas Sully, who was on the verge of his own long career in Philadelphia. Eichholtz sought out the elderly Gilbert Stuart, then dean of portraiture and the most famous artist in America. While Stuart took no formal pupils, he generously shared his experience with aspiring young artists such as Eichholtz and Sully who visited him in Boston. Such mentoring was critical at a time when formal art training in the United States was still in its infancy. The freshness and quickness of this portrait of a lovely young mother and her children reveal that Eichholtz learned his lessons well. The light palette with its silvery accents and sketchy background landscape testifies to the continuing influence of the English school of portraiture. At the same time, the gestural interplay among the figures, as well as their variety of poses, shows Eichholtz's confidence as a mature painter, three years into a successful Philadelphia residency. Eichholtz enjoyed a prosperous career in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Lancaster, where he returned in the early 1840s.