2-999-685 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Old Woman and Child Reading a Book, 1840s. An old woman sits with her feet propped on a hassock, looking pensively into the distance. The young girl at her side reads from a large book. Such details of costume as the woman's lace ruff and the girl's unfinished carved chair place this in the seventeenth-century period context that was prized by American collectors and fashionable among Düsseldorf artists in the period before the American Civil War. The relationship between generations that is a recurrent theme in Woodville's work is treated here as contented coexistence.