Portrait of Mary McClellan by Winthrop Chandler 1776

Provenance: Formerly owned by Carlo May of Woodstock (his wife was the great, great granddaughter of Mrs. Jemima Chandler) and was exhibited at Putnam, Connecticut, March 15-20, 1880. From 1959 to 1975 it was owned by Mrs. Joseph Rosenthal of Waterford, Connecticut, and was later owned by descendants of the subject. Purchased from Estates Unlimited, Cranston, Rhode Island, July 25, 2008. From Skinner Auction

The Arthur & Sybil Kern Collection of American Folk Art

Winthrop Chandler was the great-grandson of Deacon John Chandler (1610–1703), one of the founders, in 1686, along with the Gore and the Ruggles families, of Woodstock, Connecticut. His father, Captain William Chandler (1698–1754), was a surveyor and farmer, and his mother, Jemima Bradbury Chandler (1703–1779), was a descendant of Massachusetts Governors Winthrop and Dudley. Winthrop Chandler was born in 1747 on Chandler Hill on the Woodstock and Thompson line in Connecticut. He was the youngest of ten children and seven years old when his father died. At the age of fourteen, he applied to the court for a guardian—required for an apprenticeship—to study painting, and selected his sister Jemima’s husband, Samuel McClellan, of South Woodstock. Read more at Incollect