The Hartley Family,

ca. 1787

After six years of artistic study in Rome, Henry ­Benbridge, a Philadelphia native, returned to America by way of London (and, probably, ­Benjamin West’s studio), settling in Charleston, South Carolina, where between 1772 and at least 1790 he was the leading artist in that wealthy, style-­conscious, Anglophilic city. <em>The Hartley Family</em>, perhaps his most ambitious work, and among the major compositions produced in America during the eighteenth century, depicts four female generations of the same prominent family — none of whom, curiously, was named Hartley when the painting was executed — in the crisp, strongly modeled, Neoclassical style Benbridge employed throughout his career. Although the sitters’ nondescript "portrait dress," characteristic of period imagery, and the similarly generic setting in which they are placed impart a timelessness to the scene, its intergenerational aspect is underscored by the spatial arrangement and poses of the subjects, particularly their linked hands and arms, which collectively suggest a circle moving clockwise from eldest to youngest sitter, as if to subtly indicate the march of time across the family’s history. Such an impression is bolstered by the background’s complementary transition from dark to light, by the gradually increasing brightness of the progressively younger subjects’ clothing, and by the heightened legibility and display of their youthful bodies, pictorially signifying their greater vitality.