biografía de Thomas CHILD (?-1706)

Lugar de nacimiento: England

Lugar de defunción: Boston, MA

Direcciones: Came from England to Boston, c. 1688

Profesión: Painter-stainer and possibly limner

Estudios: apprenticed to the London Company of Painter-Stainers, 1671 to 1679.

Comentarios: Child was admitted to the London Painters and Stainers Guild in 1679. He is next recorded in New England in 1688 (he is known to have arrived before April 1688), when he began painting houses, churches, hatchments (heraldic devices) on coffins, and scutcheons. He is also known to have made and sold house paint. The question as to whether Child ever painted portraits has been studied by scholars who have had to rely on circumstantial evidence. Frederic W. Coburn, for one, attributed a portrait of Sir William Phipps to Child. Other scholars have looked closely at a poem written by Judge Samuel Sewall in his diary on Nov. 10, 1706: This morning Tom Child, the Painter, died./Tom Child had often painted Death/ But never to the Life, before:/ Doing it now he's out of Breath:/ He paints it once and paints no more." William Sawitzky and Wayne Craven have interpreted Sewall's words to be a reference to Child's as a painter of hatchments (heraldic devices) on coffins, rather than as a limner of (living) human beings.

Fuentes: Groce & Wallace cited information from William Sawitzky; Coburn, "Thomas Child;" Sewall, "Diary," Mass. Hist. Soc. Collections, Ser. 5, Vol. 6, p. 170; Barker, American Painting, 16-20; Craven, Colonial American Portraiture, 87-88. "