A gentleman
by Joseph Wood, circa 1810.

Set in the original ‘rolled gold' locket frame with gilt spandrel, beaded bezel, the reverse with aperture containing two lockets of hair and red ribbon.

2 1/16 inches high.

Joseph Wood (1778-1832) is one of the very finest and probably the most underrated of American miniature painters. Mary Way, already an accomplished artist when she arrived in New York City to study in 1811, wrote "...Wood, who from what I had heard and seen, I considered the only painter here worth notice." Joseph Wood, the son of a farmer in Clarkstown, New York, ran away to New York City to become a painter at the age of fifteen. After apprenticing with a silversmith and teaching himself to paint, he established himself as a portraitist by the age of twenty one. In 1803, Wood formed a partnership with John Wesley Jarvis. The highly successful duo made a great deal of money and enjoyed their wealth and fame. During this golden time, the two met Edward Greene Malbone who became a close friend, instructing them both on aspects of miniature painting. The partners went their separate ways in 1809, Jarvis taking on Henry Inman as an apprentice, and Wood taking on Nathaniel Rogers; between then spawning the greatest miniature dynasty in America. Wood moved to Philadelphia in 1813, then on to Baltimore in 1818, working both there and Washington, D.C. Wood's final days were spent in poverty, his work reduced to executing drawings for patent applications. His notoriously decadent life was the stimulus for a temperance tract published in 1934. And, despite it all, Joseph Wood's powerful portraits are among the finest ever painted in America. His works are exceedingly rare.

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