Ruth Cameron

Artist

Mary Lewis Ayer (1878–1957)

Date

about 1910

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

30 x 22 in. (76.2 x 55.9 cm)

Description

Little is known about the Illinois-born artist Mary Lewis Ayer, except that she studied and worked in Boston. In emulation of the style of her teacher, Edmund Tarbell (1862–1938), Ayer painted this portrait with vigorous, fluid brushstrokes in fresh and bright tones. The sitter, Ruth E. Cameron, strikes a fairly conventional pose and wears a genteel dress with a ubiquitous pink bow. She is large on the canvas and, with her intense gaze, directly confronts the viewer. There is something adult-like in her attitude that defies her chronological age (about nine years old), as if to suggest, in miniature, the woman that she will become.

Credit Line

Gift of the estate of Ruth Cameron, 1992

Object Number

UR244