Goodridge Sarah was a miniature painter. Her artistic talent manifested itself early, and before she was able to buy paper she drew sketches of her family and companions on birch bark.
Background
Sarah Goodridge was born on February 5, 1788, in Templeton, Massachusetts. She was the sixth of the nine children of Ebenezer Goodridge, a farmer and mechanic of Templeton, Massachusets, and his wife Beulah Childs.
Sarah was descended from William Goodridge, an English immigrant who was admitted freeman to Watertown, Massachusets, in 1642.
Education
Until Sarah was seventeen, she remained, for the most part, in Templeton, where she received the customary district-school training. Thereafter, she alternated between her father’s home and those of her brothers and sister.
Sarah's artistic talent manifested itself early, and before she was able to buy paper she drew sketches of her family and companions on birch bark. Since the esthetic advantages of rural New England were negligible, she had little instruction, for examples only crude woodcuts, and was necessary for the main self-taught.
For a few months, she attended a boarding school in Milton, where she had gone to keep house with her brother William.
Later, she accompanied him to Boston and had a few drawing lessons from a man in his household.
Career
After teaching for two summers in the Templeton school, Sarah returned to Boston in 1812, where she lived with her sister, Mrs. Thomas Appleton, and began her career as an artist.
The following summer she was again in Templeton, making portraits of her friends at the rate of fifty cents for a life-size crayon drawing, and $1. 50 for a sketch in watercolors. She resumed her residence in Boston that fall in the home of her second brother, with whom she remained for two years.
For a time she devoted herself to oils, but after studying with an artist from Hartford, who taught her all he knew of painting on ivory, she abandoned everything in favor of miniatures.
While she was in Boston, it was her good fortune to meet Gilbert Stuart, who became interested in her work and invited her to take her unfinished miniatures to his studio for criticism and suggestions.
During the years from 1820 to 1824 when she enjoyed his informal instruction, her work gained both sureness and delicacy. At his request, she painted a miniature of him in 1825, with which he was sufficiently pleased to have it preserved in a bracelet with his own and his wife’s hair.
An engraving from it was cut by A. B. Durand for The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, and she herself made two replicas of it. Her other miniatures included Isaiah Thomas, a painting which, according to his friend Rev. George Allen, “should be known as the best likeness” of him, and of which a steel engraving by Henry W. Smith was included in the second edition of Thomas’s History of Printing in America! Christopher Columbus Baldwin; Gen. Henry Lee; Russell Sturgis; Daniel Webster, of which many replicas were made; and Gen. Knox. The last was a copy of Stuart’s only miniature, which he painted for her as an example in technique.
Although Sarah Goodridge never attained the fragile loveliness of some of her contemporaries, her work, by reason of its directness and simplicity, was unusually forceful.
She twice visited Washington, D. C. , in 1828 and in 1841, but although she was well received, she found Boston a more congenial and profitable city.
During the years of her residence there, she painted about two miniatures a week, supported her mother for the last eleven years of her life, nursed a paralytic brother for two years, and reared her orphaned niece. Her best work was done before 1840.
Sarah continued to draw with unflagging energy until 1850 when the failure of her eyes compelled her to retire. In 1851, Sarah removed with her sister’s family to Reading, Massachusetts. She died of paralysis during a Christmas visit in Boston.