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Lovice Corbett Whittemore (Mrs. Thomas Whittemore) by Clark, Alvan

Clark, Alvan · 1845

This is Lovice Corbett Whittemore, painted in 1845 by Alvan Clark. The portrait hangs quietly in a museum, a rare survivor of a career that swerved sharply away from art.

Clark is far better known today as the greatest telescope lens maker of the 19th century. His firm, Alvan Clark & Sons, ground the lenses for the world's largest refracting telescopes, instruments that split double stars and mapped the moon. But before the glass, there was canvas.

Only a handful of Clark's paintings are known to exist, and this one dates from the very year he abandoned portraiture for optics. Lovice sits composed, her black silk dress and wedding ring marking her place in the mercantile class of 1840s Massachusetts. The lace cap and careful modeling of her face show an artist who understood light intimately, even before he devoted his life to bending it.

A portrait is always a record of attention. This one records a woman, and also a moment just before the man holding the brush turned away from people and toward the sky.

Details

Before he built the world's largest telescope lenses, he painted portraits.
Before he built the world's largest telescope lenses, he painted portraits.
Alvan Clark. An artist turned optician.
Alvan Clark. An artist turned optician.
Delicately rendered translucent lace against dark hair , a virtuoso passage of fabric texture that tests any painter's technique.
Delicately rendered translucent lace against dark hair , a virtuoso passage of fabric texture that tests any painter's technique.
The deep black and tightly fitted silhouette is characteristic of fashionable mourning or formal dress of the 1845 period, dating the painting precisely.
The deep black and tightly fitted silhouette is characteristic of fashionable mourning or formal dress of the 1845 period, dating the painting precisely.
Transcript

Before he built the world's largest telescope lenses, he painted portraits. Alvan Clark. An artist turned optician. Look at the ring on her hand. Her name was Lovice Corbett Whittemore. This is one of the only paintings Clark made. He left art for the stars. But here, he recorded a single woman, with the care of a man who looked closely.