Portrait of Sarah Stoddard Eddy (1831-1904) illustrated in A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches (Buffalo, New York and Chicago), 1893.

Sarah Stoddard, who was highly esteemed for her literary skills, assisted her brother William with the editing of the Repository.  She wrote both fiction and poetry, and achieved much attention with the publication of her story “The Young Physician.”²³  Sarah lived with William and his family at 131 Warren Street until her death in 1877.

Succeeding generations were just as industrious and accomplished as Ashbel Stoddard and his children.  For instance, William’s daughter Sarah Stoddard Eddy (1831-1904), wife of Reverend Richard Eddy, was a reformer actively involved in the women’s suffrage movement.²⁴  While she and her husband resided in Boston, Sarah was a member of a number of women’s literary clubs, educational unions and suffrage associations.  She had organized similar clubs and associations in the various towns where she and her husband resided before settling in Massachusetts.

The Stoddard Portraits

In about 1812, Ammi Phillips left Massachusetts for New York State and settled briefly in Hudson, arriving when the city was still prosperous but on the brink of an economic decline brought about by the War of 1812.  Here he painted portraits of one of the city’s leading citizens, Ashbel Stoddard, and his wife Patience.  The portraits of the Stoddards depict a confident, sophisticated and fashionably dressed married couple who had achieved an enviable level of material comfort and occupied respectable positions in society.  The symbol of Stoddard’s success as a printer is seen in the copy of Washington’s Farewell Address held in his left hand.  The cultured and leisured lifestyle that Stoddard’s prosperous business afforded his wife is implied by the book of poems that Patience tilts forward in her right hand.

The portraits of the Stoddards represent a transition from Phillips’s experimental phase to the beginning of his so-called Border period.  During the years 1812 to 1819, when Phillips painted in the border regions of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York, his portraits exhibited a greater degree of realism while retaining many of the naïve elements of the works from 1811.  He also introduced to his portraits a light, pearly gray background that would be supplanted later by a dark, velvety ground characteristic of his succeeding phase, the Realistic period of 1820 to 1828.