Description
Faith Savage Waldo (Mrs. Cornelius Waldo) is a three-quarter-length portrait of an elderly woman facing three-quarters to the right; her eyes gaze at the viewer. She wears a white cap with two layers of fabric surrounding her face. The cap is tied in a bow with a narrow white ribbon at her neck. Mrs. Waldo has hazel eyes and a face that is nearly round, with creases to the sides of her nose and mouth. The modeling is stark, and the edges are hard. Her flesh droops along her jawline, and her throat swells between two creases.

Mrs. Waldo wears a brown dress patterned with lighter-brown flowers. White sleeves drape below the elbow-length sleeves of a shift. Her shoulders are draped in a plain, solid-white cloth. Her ruffled white bonnet is secured beneath the chin with a bow.

The subject sits in a high-backed wooden armchair with blue-green upholstery on the back and seat. In her lap she holds a book that is slightly open, to page forty-six. Mrs. Waldo’s proper left hand rests in her lap, its index finger extended. The hand’s contours are outlined with brown lines but have less detail than the hands in her husband’s portrait. Her proper left arm is awkwardly painted and seems disconnected from her body.

Behind the sitter, at the upper-right, is a solid-green drapery with fringed edges and a single tassel hanging from a braided cable. The rest of the background is a relatively even dark brown, with a narrow band of a light brown along Mrs. Waldo’s proper left arm.

Biography
Faith Savage Waldo was born on October 3, 1683, to Thomas (1640–1705) and Elizabeth Scottow Savage (1647–1714).¹ Her father was a merchant and a military officer who fought in King Philip’s War and, in 1690, led a regiment in Sir William Phips’s unsuccessful attack on the French in Canada. On August 28, 1711, she married Cornelius Waldo (1684–1753), a Boston merchant and distiller who owned land in Watertown, Worcester, Rutland, and Holden, Massachusetts as well as in Maine.² At the time of their wedding, Faith Savage was pregnant with the first of the couple’s nine children.

Mrs. Waldo also was a merchant in her own right. Advertisements in the Boston newspapers offered imported fabrics:

To be sold by Mrs. Faith Waldo at the next House to the Bunch of Grapes Tavern, in Leverett’s Lane, Boston, Brocaded Silks, flower’d Damasks, Sattins, Lute-strings, Mantua Silks, black Padosoy, Alamode, Damask Table Linnen, Chints, Callicoes, fine Cambricks, Muslins, Hollands, Garlicks and sundry other choice Goods, lately Imported from London, by Wholesale and Retail at very Reasonable Rates.³

Notably, Mrs. Waldo wears a "flower’d Damask" in this portrait. By 1737, her husband was advertising similar textile imports for sale. As the social historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has demonstrated, women at this time often participated in their husbands’ businesses; in this instance, it appears that Cornelius was active in and eventually took over, his wife’s enterprise.⁴

Faith Savage Waldo died in Boston on February 3, 1760.

Analysis
The attribution of this portrait to Joseph Badger was made in 1917 by Lawrence Park, who assembled the first biography and checklist on the artist.⁵ In the nineteenth century, the work was incorrectly attributed to John Smibert.⁶ Despite suggestions that the portrait may have been updated by a second hand, the surface appears to be the work of a single artist.⁷ The date is based on the assumption that it was painted at about the same time as the companion portrait of the sitter’s husband, which is inscribed "1750."

That Faith Savage Waldo (Mrs. Cornelius Waldo) and Cornelius Waldo are pendants is supported by the fact that the dimensions of the two paintings, the three-quarter-length format, and the pose and chair in which each is seated are all alike. Although paired portraits typically face one another, these likenesses each face toward the viewer’s right. Despite these similarities, the portrait of Mrs. Waldo appears cruder than that of her husband. Badger made less effort to provide individualizing detail, and his paint handling is generally less fluid and subtle. As painted, Mrs. Waldo’s arms, especially the proper left one, reflect the artist’s problems with foreshortening.

Figure 1. John Faber, Jr., after John Vanderbank, Sir Isaac Newton, 1725, mezzotint, 13 3/4 x 9 1/8 in. (34.9 x 23.2 cm), Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, Delaware. Courtesy, Winterhur Museum.

That Mrs. Waldo holds a book is a sign of her literacy.¹² The figure is static, so the book’s presence appears to suggest the woman’s intelligence and accomplishment rather than to imply that the viewer has interrupted her reading. Since the book she holds cannot be identified, it is impossible to know exactly why it is part of the portrait. Sometimes, a sitter’s piety was revealed by the inclusion of a Bible, as in Christian Gullager’s Martha Saunders Salisbury.

Notes
1. The biography of Faith Savage is based on Lincoln 1902, I, 73–74; Park 1914, 10–11; and Hall 1883, 101.

2. Boston Marriages 1898, 38. Cornelius Waldo and Faith Savage were married by the Reverend Mr. Ebenezer Pemberton, a Presbyterian.

3. Boston Weekly News-Letter, May 4–25, 1732, and Weekly Rehearsal, Boston, June 18–July 9, 1733. Lincoln 1902, I, 32. Some confusion existed about whether this business was the sitter’s, since her mother-in-law’s name also was Faith Waldo. However, the elder woman’s death was announced on June 25, 1733, and the advertisements continued for months afterward and announced textiles that were "just imported." Cornelius Waldo’s advertisements for similar goods, 1737–42, available at the same address are quoted in Lincoln 1902, I, 70.

4. Ulrich 1991a, 35–50.

5. Park 1918a, 200.

6. Tuckerman 1867, 42.

7. William Sawitzky proposed that Christian Gullager might have updated the Badger portraits when he painted likenesses of Cornelius and Faith Waldo’s son and daughter-in-law, Daniel Waldo, Sr. and Rebecca Salisbury Waldo, in Worcester about 1789. Dresser 1949, 110; Sadik 1976, 18 and 33 n 14. After examining the Waldo portraits closely with the museum’s conservator, Edmond de Beaumont, the curator Louisa Dresser concluded, "No evidence can be found that these areas are of later date than the rest of the painted surfaces." Memorandum, June 26, 1956, object file, Worcester Art Museum. Close physical examination of the painting undertaken for this catalogue supports the attribution to a single artist.

8. Sellers 1957, 425, 427; Belknap 1959, 290, 325, and plate 18.

9. Sellers 1957, 412; Prosser 1995, 200.

10. Colonial women in Massachusetts, especially those of Mrs. Waldo’s social position, were generally literate.