Sheppy Dog Fund Lecture - Paradise in the Parlor: At Home with the Fowler Family

Dr. Janine Yorimoto Boldt, Guest Lecturer

The group portrait of Delia, Milo, and Gertrude Fowler, the three youngest children of John Nash Fowler, has long been a popular painting at the Flint Institute of Arts. According to family tradition, the painting was created around 1854 in Clayton, New York, before the family relocated to Detroit, Michigan. The three children sit in a garden setting with an imaginary Edenic landscape behind them. Some of the portrait's iconography suggests that it is a post-mortem portrait of the youngest child pictured, with the landscape referencing heaven. However, there is no archival record of a death in the family around the time the portrait was painted. This presentation will discuss the history of the portrait and the Fowler family and consider the painting in the context of their evangelical, Methodist faith. The portrait expressed moralizing lessons and values and can be understood in relation to domestic religious practices in mid-nineteenth-century America.

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