Background
According to a Halifax tradition Robert Field was born in Gloucestershire, England.
engraver miniaturist painter of portraits in oil
According to a Halifax tradition Robert Field was born in Gloucestershire, England.
Field advertised himself as “late of London, ” and it is known that in 1790 he joined the engraving class at the Royal Academy School.
This date is the basis of the birth date tentatively assigned above. His earliest known work was his mezzotint portrait of Rev. Thomas Warton. Possibly at the suggestion of Benjamin West, Field left England on February 27, 1794, landing at Baltimore, where he soon gained the friendship and substantial support of Robert Gilmor, a noted connoisseur and collector. Thus began a residence of fourteen years in the United States, during which Field painted at Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, and Boston.
His engraved portraits of Washington and Hamilton were advertised in the American Minerva and New York Advertiser of April 23, 1795 (Piers, p. 12). The former work appeared, but the latter was never issued (Boston Museum of Fine Arts, A Descriptive Catalogue of an Exhibition of Early Engraving in America, 1904, p. 34).
Field is believed by his biographer, Harry Piers, not to have painted the Washington miniature now owned by the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and by them attributed to him. In 1801, however, he visited Mount Vernon and painted Mrs. Washington from life. His American paintings in oil were unsigned, and some of the Philadelphia “Stuarts” are suspected of being the work of Robert Field.
During several years’ residence in the capital he painted many celebrities and won social recognition. In 1805, following the example of Stuart and Malbone, he removed to Boston, then a fast-growing seaport.
At Boston Field made several engravings and a notable miniature of his fellow artist, Henry Sargent. The growing tension between the United States and England may have caused Field, who never had been naturalized, to return to British territory.
In 1808 (not in 1807 as stated in the Boston Museum’s Descriptive Catalogue), he set up as a “portrait painter, in oil and water-colours, and in miniature” at Halifax, thus advertising himself in the Royal Gazette, May 30, 1808 ( Piers, p. 52).
Nova Scotia at the time was prosperous because of the American Embargo, and Field found much employment. He was befriended by Sir John Wentworth, royal governor, whose portrait he painted (it is now in Government House).
By 1815 Field’s income from portraiture must have fallen off, for he then opened a book-shop in Water St. , Halifax. In 1816, evidently seeking new employment, he went to Jamaica where, after presumably indifferent success, he died of yellow fever.
William Dunlap, author of A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834), who met Field in Boston, wrote of him : “He was a handsome, stout, gentlemanly man, and a favorite with gentlemen. . .. I remember two very beautiful female heads by him; one of Mrs. Allen, in Boston, and one of Mrs. Thornton, of Washington” (edition of 1918, II, 119).