Museum accessions - Litchfield Female Academy and Charlotte Hopper Newcomb - Brief Article

Magazine Antiques, April, 2002 by Eleanor H. Gustafson

Much has been written about the Litchfield Female Academy, a school in Litchfield, Connecticut, started by Sarah Pierce in 1792, and a plethora of documents from the school survive in private and public collections around the country, most notably the Litchfield Historical Society. There, among many other items, are letters, reminiscences, and diaries of students and teachers, textbooks used at the school, scrapbooks, and some of the works of art executed at the school--particularly watercolors and needlework pictures. To this treasure trove has been added yet another jewel in the form of the needlework picture illustrated above, which is accompanied by the journal kept by Charlotte Hopper Newcomb while she was a student at the school in 1809 and 1810 and in which she records her progress on the picture. Fortuitously, portraits of Charlotte and her husband also survive, and these, also illustrated here, have recently been acquired by the Springfield Museum of Art in Ohio.

The seminal source of information about the Litchfield Female Academy was the myriad records gathered and organized in the 1890s by Emily Noyes Vanderpoel. Her work and subsequent research (published in Chronicles of a Pioneer School from 1792 to 1833... [1903] and More Chronicles of a Pioneer School from 1792 to 1833 [1927]) reveal the names of more than two thousand girls who attended the school, and, while several Newcomb girls were among them, Charlotte was not, adding to the documentary significance of her journal. Born on July 20, 1795, Charlotte lived in Pleasant Valley, New York, a small Dutchess County village on the Hudson River, in a house built about 1760 that still stands. She was fourteen when she went to the Litchfield school and possibly stayed longer than the period covered in the journal. In 1816 she married Dr. Abijah Gilbert Benedict, whom she had met when he was studying with Dr. James Downs in Pleasant Valley. They bad nine children and lived in Red Hook, New York. Their eldest son, the Reverend Thomas N. Benedict, moved to Illinois by 1850, and his descendants came into possession of the needlework, journal, and portraits. Their curiosity led them to the Litchfield Historical Society and the rest, as they say, is history.

Needlework and other decorative accomplishments were not among the main concerns of Sarah Pierce, who remained in charge of the school until 1827 and whose emphasis was on scholastic achievement, but she succumbed to societal and parental expectations and offered the ornamental arts as well. Surviving needlework from the school ranges from simple samplers to elaborate pictures such as Charlotte Newcomb's. Worked in silk on silk, it depicts Moses in the bullrushes, a subject that Vanderpoel's research suggested had been worked at the school, but no example of which bad come to light.

The portraits of the Benedicts are attributed to the well-known itinerant painter Ammi Phillips, who is known to have worked in Dutchess County where the Benedicts lived. Self-taught, Phillips overcame shortcomings in his technique to produce some of the most charming portraits of the early nineteenth century. In fact, his work graced the houses of many members of Connecticut and Hudson River valley society.