Like many women in the late 1700s in America, Mary Way and Elizabeth Way Champlain received training in sewing skills, embroidery, and watercolors.

They used the training designed to make them ideal wives and mothers to become two of the earliest independent women artists working in the United States. Their specialty was creating collaged miniature portraits, many of them dressed in actual fabric. These tiny portraits were created as keepsakes and were, among people who could afford them, as telling and as popular as selfies are today.

“What makes their work so interesting is that they produce these early multimedia portrait miniatures with fabric,” says Tanya Pohrt, curator of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum in New London, which has many of these works in its collections. “They were not professionally trained as artists, but they took their education...intended to prepare young women for housekeeping and to show their refinement and gentility, and shifted gears and incorporated them into an existing tradition of painting these portrait miniatures that were being produced mostly by men in this era.”

Pohrt, who will discuss the Way sisters in an online talk being hosted by the New Haven Museum on Thursday, March 10 at 6 p.m., says the small works are extraordinary and made all the more so because they were made by two women. “There was a moment, you know in the mid- to late-18th century and in the early 19th century when if you wanted a portrait, this was all the rage.”

Registration is required for the event and can be made by visiting the museum’s events page at www.newhavenmuseum.org, or by calling 203-562-4183.

Near the Heart

During the height of their popularity, from about the 1780s to the 1830s, the miniatures were often stored in beautiful jewelry lockets and worn on the body, often near the heart. Men and women would often exchange miniatures when they were engaged or married. There might be a lock of hair in a compartment in the back of the locket.

“So they were kept very close and held very dear by the people who had them,” Pohrt says.

While many museums have them in their collections, they are often tucked away in storage since they are fragile and susceptible to damage from the light.

“But the stories they tell are fascinating,” she says.

Much of the Way sisters’ early work portrayed prominent members of their own community, the increasingly prosperous mercantile community in and around New London. They painted portraits of men who played prominent roles in the American Revolution and others who were leaders in commerce and trade, along with their families.

“There were quite a few sitters in the exhibition who were engaged in various aspects of the West Indies trade,” says Pohrt, men who made their fortunes in part from the Triangle Trade that involved trading food and manufactured goods raw materials and for people who were enslaved. One of the miniatures in the museum’s collection is adhered to a piece of sugar paper, a kind of blue paper used to wrap sugar from plantations for transport when it was shipped for distribution.

“Once it’s used up, it’s the equivalent of what a used brown paper bag is now. But it was an artifact of this trade,” she says.

A miniature that Mary made of Charles Holt, her cousin, tells a story about Mary’s sympathy and support for her cousin Charles who was, at the time the portrait was made, “awaiting imprisonment for alleged sedition against the Federalist-run government,” according to Brian Erlich, writing in The Magazine Antiques. “It was both a personal and political statement in support of Holt’s stand for the basic freedoms inherent in the United States Constitution, and was consequently in direct opposition to the views of Way’s predominantly Federalist New London clientele.”

A ‘Revolutionary Statement’

Erlich notes that Mary inscribed on the back “Mary Way,/fecit/New London,/Feb. 18th,/1800,” making it the only work she ever signed and dated, and that she portrays him dressed in what appears to be an American militia uniform.

“By specifically dating the miniature, she draws attention to Holt at the moment when he was under legal attack by the Federalists. Moreover, by giving her cousin a military presence, she suggests his role as an esteemed leader in the cause of free expression,” Erlich writes. “The creation of this intimate locket can be viewed as an expression of Way’s opposition to the political views of the majority of her New London clientele and her state’s Federalist tradition, making it a revolutionary statement of her own.”

Read more about that in The Magazine Antiques at www.themagazineantiques.com.

Another important historical figure painted by the sisters was Brigadier General Jedediah Huntington, who fought with General George Washington at Valley Forge. Members of the Saltonstall family also paid to have their portraits painted by one of the sisters.

“The sisters were working after the Revolution, this is in the 1790s that a lot of these people are having their portraits taken, but it’s at this moment when they’re late in life and the war is long over that they’re trying to think about their legacy and to leave an image of themselves for their children, wanting to be remembered,” Pohrt says.

A Product of Post-Revolutionary Republican Society

While the Way sisters were extraordinary in their decision to become artists and in their ability to make at least a modest living off of their work, in other ways they were very much a product of the post-Revolutionary society in which they and their clientele lived, says historian Catherine E. Kelly in a video posted on the Lyman Allyn Museum website www.lymanallyn.org/the-way-sisters.

At the time the sisters were plying their trade, education, and a specific kind of education, was highly valued within their community. Education was tied to standards of gentility.

“To teach your daughters to read and write, to do fine ornamental work, to play an instrument, to sing, and maybe speak a smattering of French, that said something about your family’s position in the world,” Kelley says. It meant that the family had the luxury of leisure time and the ability to “elevate themselves above the physical labor that dominated the lives of so many women.”

Women and men born into this particular culture in New England became among the most literate in the world. In addition to standards of gentility, this education was tied also to notions of what it meant to be a good and moral citizen of the newly born Republic.

“The world [the sisters] begin to create art in understands education as having a specific value in the context of the American Revolution,” Kelly says.

Pre-revolutionary citizens simply obeyed decrees set down by kings, Kelly says, but after the Revolution, “in a Republic, citizens are expected to read and write, they have to make judgments, and discern who will represent them. In the years following the Revolution, there is this outpouring and flowering of education, both in the founding of common schools and academies for young women and men.”

Good citizens were powered by reason, not passion and impulse. Women in particular needed to be educated so that they could raise up citizens who were educated “as republican mothers” and also so that they could have interesting conversations with their republican husbands.

Aesthetic Education Central

Aesthetic education and the arts were central to this idea of what it meant to be a good republican citizen. There were public celebrations of penmanship and pictorial embroidery. Students’ essays were put on display. In the same way that entire towns now turn out to see football games and then pick up the local newspaper to read about them, people in the new Republic, entire communities, would turn out to see what young men and women created, Kelly says.

“It wasn’t just the parents, the entire community was invested in making sure young women and men were gaining an education that was aesthetic as well as practical and academic,” Kelly says.

Connected to a Moral Compass

Good republican citizens needed to be well educated, discerning, and “have a capacity for taste connected with a moral compass, and taste was exercised in multiple modes, especially the visual,” Kelly says. “What was a good piece of art to buy? Which were the best novels? Aesthetic discernment was connected to political discernment. And it was connected to someone’s moral compass.”

The world in which the Way sisters lived was one that was hungry both for the arts and self improvement.

This not only helped create a market of people who appreciated the work of the Way sisters, this education also gave the sisters the skills to do some unique works of art that are among their most remarkable, the dressed miniatures.

“As far as we know, the Way sisters were really the only ones who made these distinctive little portrait miniatures with clothing,” Pohrt says. “With this kind of detail there is a kind of three dimensionality.”

A Love for This Act of Creation

The dressed miniatures were made by the sisters early in their career.

Mary Way, who, unlike her sister Betsey, never married, eventually moved to New York City, studied with other artists, and then turned to the more traditional and predictable method of creating miniatures primarily with watercolors on ivory.

Pohrt, who has read letters the sisters wrote to each other when Mary was living in New York, says she thinks they succeeded in becoming artists because, after starting small and meeting with some success, they just decided to persevere.

“I think that they just really had a love for this act of creation, of producing beautiful things,” she says. “They took pride in their work and the way they could connect with the communities around them, and, within this tight-knit community within New London, they were doing something no one else was doing. And they had a lot of different ties to people that I think helped, these networks of patronage that helped support them.”

It was not until the early 1990s that the extent of the work done by the Way sisters was discovered. While their works were in the collections of major museums, they had been often marked as “unidentified maker” or “anonymous.”

Ramsay MacMullen, a descendant of the sisters, then discovered in an old piece of family furniture the sisters’ letters and quite a few works. He transcribed the letters, organized them by date, and published them in a book, Sisters of the Brush: Their Art and Life, 1790-1835.

“It really makes you think that there are probably a lot of other stories of people like this out there, that have been lost to history,” Pohrt says.

She says the letters not only shed light on the sisters’ art and work, but also their personalities.

“Betsey had this very flowery kind of poetic, artistic sense of flair. Mary was a little bit more buttoned up and serious,” Pohrt says. “So there would be times that Betsey would send Mary a poem. And she would kind of cut them down, saying, ‘They’re too flowery.” Or, you know, ‘You’re putting on airs.’” In other words, she took her down a notch in a good-natured way that only sisters can.

While the Way sisters did make something of a living with their art, they also supplemented their income by teaching. And Betsey eventually married and had children.

Their letters show that Mary, when she was working in New York, charged $10 for paintings that took a week, and $20 for those she worked on “for a fortnight,” or about two weeks. In 1800, $10 was worth about $250. While she met with some success, Mary while in New York grew ill and lost her eyesight. She had trouble paying her bills and when she had to return to New London, her friends in New York held a benefit for her to help her pay off her debts before she returned home.

Pohrt admits that’s a sad ending, but she remains inspired by the story of the sisters’ “artistic agency, ingenuity, and social finesse” and the works that resulted.

In a letter to a friend, Mary described what kept her going in the face of obstacles: “ardent hopes, desires, and that enthusiasm that inspires and animates the soul to contend with obstacles, and triumph over difficulties.”