Samuel Lovett Waldo

1783-1861

American (New York, New York)

The portraitist Samuel Lovett Waldo was born April 6, 1783, in Windham, Connecticut. At the age of sixteen he went to Hartford and took drawing lessons. He set up a studio there in 1803, but found few clients and supplemented his income by painting signs. In 1806 he went to study art in England. Waldo returned to America in 1809 and settled permanently in New York.

Waldo served on the board of directors at the American Academy of the Fine Arts from 1817 until 1828, and in 1826 he was one of the founding members of the National Academy of Design, of which he became an associate in 1847. He died in New York on February 16, 1861. One of the most successful and competent portraitists active in New York during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Waldo was a businesslike, conservative painter who produced sober, literal likenesses that seldom achieved profound insights into his clients' personalities.

Artist profile image: Samuel Lovett Waldo Self-portrait, ca. 1815. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 22.217.1.

Samuel Lovett Waldo

Objects

Waldo, Samuel Lovett 1783-1861

Portrait of Simon Schermerhorn

ca. 1835