Maria Clarissa Leavitt

ca. 1820-1825

These portraits were painted around the time that the sitters moved from New York to Brooklyn, where David Leavitt had an interest in the Brooklyn White Lead Company (later Dutch Boy Paint). One of his partners in this enterprise was the Brooklyn Museum’s founder, Augustus Graham. In this work, David Leavitt looks up from his newspaper, which signals involvement as a citizen in the larger world of business and politics.

Maria Leavitt, fashionably dressed and coiffed, is seated in a Neoclassical armchair before an open window. A generalized landscape view associates her with nature—a reference both to the sheltered lifestyle of a lady in society and to the heightened sensitivity then attributed to the female gender.