Artwork story
About Molly Wales Fobes
The artist and artwork
Rufus Hathaway painted Molly Wales Fobes in 1790, when he was only twenty years old. The oil-on-canvas portrait, about thirty-four inches high, is his earliest known work and one of the best-known pictures by an American country painter. No record of formal artistic training survives. Even so, The Met praises Hathaway’s bold color and command of two-dimensional design. He painted portraits for only about five years in the early 1790s; works became rare after 1795, when he left painting to practice medicine.
The world around it
The portrait was made in post-Revolutionary Massachusetts, when painters were representing the citizens of a young republic and portraiture dominated American artistic production. Beyond preserving a likeness, a commissioned portrait could announce a sitter’s taste, status, character, and aspirations. Hathaway worked outside the major academic centers, but provincial did not mean isolated: makers and patrons encountered European styles through circulating prints. The Met identifies this highly symbolic picture as an attempt to translate fashionable European portrait conventions for a local American setting. It was probably painted for Molly Wales Fobes’s engagement to Reverend Elijah Leonard; they married in 1792.
A detail to notice
Hathaway gives Molly an entire supporting cast: a black cat rises from the lower corner, a brilliant bird stands inside a suspended ring, another perches on the chair, and two butterflies hover beside her enormous white feathers. The arrangement is not simply a household inventory. Contemporary viewers could read the animals as emblems of beauty, discipline, poise, and loyalty, the virtues then sought in a bride. Her ostrich plumes and hérisson, or hedgehog-style, coiffure copy contemporary French fashion, probably learned from prints. A flowered fan, blossoms pinned to her bodice, coral dress, and still frontal pose complete a portrait that is both fashionable and wonderfully strange: rural Massachusetts dressed itself in an international visual language, then added a cat and a small private aviary.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on canvas and held in The American Wing.
Recorded dimensions include 34 1/4 x 32 in. (86.6 x 81.3 cm).
Subject terms include Birds, Portraits, Women, Cats, and Butterflies. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1963.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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