Cornelia Ad le Strong Fassett

Background

She was born in Owasco, Cayuga County, New York, the daughter of Captain Walter and Elizabeth (Gonsales) Strong.

Education

She received instruction in water-color painting from J. B. Wandesforde, an English artist, in New York City, then studied crayon drawing and painting in oil under Castiglione, La Tour, and Matthieu during a subsequent three years' sojourn in Paris and Rome.

For twenty years she pursued her art career in Chicago, near the end of which time she was elected a member of the Chicago Academy of Design.

Career

Her works include numerous portraits in miniature and many in oils. Among the studies painted from life were those of Presidents Grant, Hayes, and Garfield; Vice-President Henry Wilson, said to be one of the most successful for which he ever sat; Charles Foster, then governor of Ohio (now in the State House at Columbus); Dr. Rankin, the president of Howard University, and many other prominent people of Chicago and Washington.

Unquestionably, her outstanding work is her representation, in oils, of "The Florida Case before the Electoral Commission" (Feb. 5, 1877), painted from life sittings in the United States Supreme Court-room.

It was purchased by Congress and now hangs in the eastern gallery of the Senate wing of the Capitol. It is a large canvas, showing the old Senate-chamber, now the Supreme Court-room, with William M. Evarts the central figure as he addressed the Court in the opening argument.

Around him are grouped some two hundred and sixty men and women, well-known figures in the political, social, and journalistic life of Washington at that period.

The picture is considered unique because each face is turned in such a way as to present an individual portrait, and the likenesses are so faithful as to be striking in so large a composition.

Mrs. Fassett devoted her last years to miniature painting, at which she was very successful.

She died suddenly, of heart-failure, in her sixty-eighth year.

Achievements

• Fassett’s painting is comparable to Samuel F. B. Morse’s much larger work, The Old House of Representatives, completed in 1822. Morse's work shows the House Chamber from the same viewpoint, though it includes almost three times fewer persons. While Fassett has to crowd her figures into receding rows, Morse was able to compose his people into groups. Fassett would have known Morse’s painting, because it had been publicly displayed at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D. C.

Works

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Membership

In 1875 she moved to Washington, D. C. , where she was elected to membership in the Washington Art Club and where her studio entertainments became a notable feature of the social life of the city.

Connections

On August 26, 1851, at the age of twenty, she married Samuel Montague Fassett, a photographer and artist of Chicago, Ill.

Father:

Walter Strong

mother Elizabeth (Gonsales) Strong

husband:

Samuel Montague Fassett