Description
Rebecca Salisbury Waldo (Mrs. Daniel Waldo) is a kit-cat portrait of a seated woman, who is turned slightly to the right and looks forward. She wears a large mob cap that is made up of layers of sheer white fabric and is decorated with ribbons; the bottom layer of the cap consists of pleated frills. There is also a large bow at the front of the cap. Waldo has brown hair that is visible at the forehead and the proper left side of her face. She has grayish-blue eyes. Her large face has a double chin and creases at the sides of her nose and mouth.

The sitter wears a translucent black mantle over a white kerchief and a blue dress. The mantle and kerchief are both trimmed with lace. Waldo has a narrow black ribbon around her neck. The sleeves of her dress end just below the elbow, where the white ruffles of her shift are visible.

Waldo sits on a sofa that is upholstered in rose-colored damask; the right side of the sofa is in shadow. Gullager used yellow and brown paint to represent a row of brass upholstery tacks along the top edge of the sofa. The woman's hands rest separately in her lap; the index finger of the proper left hand crosses awkwardly under the middle finger. Gullager painted the veins of Waldo's right hand with faint gray lines and outlined the underside of her proper right arm and hand and some of the fingers with black paint.

There is a fluted column behind the sitter at upper right. A light red drapery with fringe hangs in front of the column and forms a swag from the upper center to the center right portion of the composition. The remainder of the background is filled with an olive green wall. Light falls from the upper left to the bottom right.

Biography
Born March 27, 1731, Rebecca Salisbury Waldo was the fourth of eleven children of Martha Saunders Salisbury (1704–1792) and Nicholas Salisbury (1697–1748). Rebecca's father was a perukemaker until her mother inherited a substantial sum from her English uncle John Elbridge (1668–1739), thereby enabling Nicholas to become a shopkeeper.¹ Rebecca was the oldest of six surviving children when her father died in 1748 and probably helped to take care of her siblings. On May 31, 1757 Rebecca married Daniel Waldo (1724–1808), the son of Cornelius Waldo (1684–1753) and Faith Savage Waldo (1683–1760) of Boston.² Daniel Waldo was a hardware merchant. The Waldos had ten children, five of whom lived to maturity; only their daughter Martha Waldo (1761–1828) married. Daniel had been admitted in 1756 as a member of the First Church Boston, and the Waldos' children were all baptized there.³

In 1775 the Waldo family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, and two years later they moved to Lancaster, Massachusetts, where Daniel sold imported goods.⁴ In March 1781 the Waldos were selling their house and in 1782 were settled in Worcester, where they remained for the rest of their lives.⁵ In May 1806, Daniel Waldo built the first brick building in Worcester, which Stephen Salisbury described in a contemporary letter: I went all over their House, Cellar, Barn, and Garden, the House has Stately Rooms and many conveniences in and about the house, and any person that has ever lived in Boston. . . I think might be content there. I found them all Engaged, and in good Spirits. . . much pleased with their new situation.⁶ When Rebecca Salisbury died on September 25, 1811, her obituary read in part, The constant exercise of all the Social and Christian virtues, made this excellent Lady an ornament and blessing to this world, and has qualified her for the Society of Heaven, where we trust she is translated.⁷ She was buried in Rural Cemetery, where her husband had been interred in 1808.

Analysis

	Figure 1. Christian Gullager, Daniel Waldo, 1789, oil on canvas, 36 x 30 1/4 in. (91.2 x 76.4 cm), Worcester Art Museum, Gift of Hester Newton Wetherell Estate, 1922.215.

The figures in Rebecca Salisbury Waldo (Mrs. Daniel Waldo) and the companion portrait Daniel Waldo turn toward one another and look at the viewer. Both paintings are kit-cat portraits, a half-length format that includes the sitter's hands. Rebecca and Daniel Waldo are set in domestic interiors with a rose-colored, fringed drapery in the background of each portrait. Whereas Rebecca sits on a sofa, Daniel sits in a wooden side chair. Gullager often painted husbands and wives on different seating furniture; sofas are common in the artist's portraits of women and side chairs appear in likenesses of both male and female subjects. Dorothy Lynde Dix (probably 1789, location unknown) and Hannah Morgan Stillman (probably 1789, Daughters of the American Revolution Museum, Washington, D.C.), for instance, are both represented on a red upholstered sofa, the top edge of which has brass tacks.¹⁰

The portrait of the Waldos' daughter depicts a three-quarter-length view of a standing figure and is approximately the same size as her parents' seated portraits. Like her mother, the young woman is shown in front of a column and a drapery. Gullager painted another similar group of three portraits: two parents, Captain David Coats and Mehitable Thurston Coats (Mrs. David Coats) (both about 1787, Saint Louis Museum of Art, Missouri), and their daughter, Elizabeth Coats (Mrs. John Greenleaf) (about 1787, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California).¹¹ In this group, too, the figures of the parents are seated and turned slightly toward one another, and the daughter is standing.

Figure 2. Unidentified artist, American, Rebecca Salisbury Waldo (Mrs. Daniel Waldo), about 1789, oil on canvas, 36 1/8 x 29 5/8 in. (91.8 x 75.3 cm), Worcester Art Museum, Gift of Stephen Salisbury III, 1901.55B.

There is a second portrait of Rebecca Salisbury Waldo (fig. 2) that her brother Stephen Salisbury I might have commissioned; it descended in the Salisbury family to Stephen Salisbury III. It, too, is a kit-cat portrait of similar dimensions to the known Gullager portrait of Waldo. The costume elements are also alike in the two portraits and include a mob cap, a white kerchief, and a black mantle. The unattributed portrait is not, however, a replica. Most notably, Waldo's face appears thinner and the tip of her nose extends farther in the portrait by the unidentified artist. Her body is also narrower in the second portrait than in the Gullager. This portrait has been attributed to Gullager and to John Johnston (1752–1818), but the attribution remains uncertain.¹³ Johnston was Gullager's chief competitor in Boston, and Salisbury might have hired either artist to paint his sister.¹⁴ Further research will be necessary to confidently attribute this portrait and to determine the circumstances under which it was created.

Notes
1. For Elbridge's will, see Salisbury 1885, I, 124–28.

2. Ibid., 21.

3. Lincoln 1902, I, 161–62.

4. Samuel Barrett to Stephen Salisbury I, Charlestown, May 3, 1775, Salisbury Family Papers, American Antiquarian Society, hereafter cited as SFP, AAS, box 3, folder 3. See also, Lincoln 1902, I, 158; and Thomas's Worcester Spy or American Oracle of Liberty, Worcester, Mass., November 26, 1778.

5. For the sale of the house in Lancaster, see The Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser, March 29, 1781. For Daniel Waldo's business in Worcester, see Thomas's Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette, October 2, 1811.

6. Stephen Salisbury I, Worcester, to Elizabeth Tuckerman Salisbury, Boston, May 17, 1806, SFP, AAS, box 13, folder 2. See also, Historic Houses of Worcester 1919, 19–20.

7. Thomas's Massachusetts Spy, or Worcester Gazette, October 2, 1811.

8. Samuel Salisbury, Boston, to Stephen Salisbury I, Worcester, September 6, 1789, SFP, AAS, box 5, folder 6.

9. Miss Waldo is illustrated in The Magazine Antiques 146: 3 (September 1994): 284.

10. Rose-colored upholstered chairs or sofas also appear in Elizabeth Sewall Salisbury (Mrs. Samuel Salisbury) (1789, Worcester Art Museum), Sara Presbury West (Mrs. David West, Sr.) (About 1795–1800, New-York Historical Society), and Matilda Davis Williams (Mrs. Jeremiah Williams) (about 1791–92, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.).

11. For more on the Coats portraits, see Dresser 1949b, 130–35. For an illustration of Captain David Coats, see the catalogue entry for Captain Offin Boardman. For Mehitable Thurston Coats (Mrs. David Coats), see Sarah Greenleaf Boardman (Mrs. Offin Boardman) and Benjamin Greenleaf Boardman.

12. Examples of Gullager sitters wearing mob caps include Elizabeth Salisbury Barrett (Mrs. Samuel Barrett) (1789, Worcester Historical Museum), Sarah Greenleaf Boardman (Mrs. Offin Boardman) and Benjamin Greenleaf Boardman (about 1787, Worcester Art Museum), and Elizabeth Sewall Salisbury (Mrs. Samuel Salisbury) (1789, Worcester Art Museum).

Examples by Ralph Earl include Mary Wright Alsop (Mrs. Richard Alsop) (1792, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.) and Angus Nickelson and Family (about 1790, Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, Massachusetts).

13. Dresser 1949b, 161.

14. For the rivalry between Gullager and Johnston, see the Massachusetts Centinel, Boston, November 14, 1789.