About The Service Society

Among the many paintings he made during his lifetime, the American artist John Singer Sargent produced half a dozen portraits of Boston society, many during the first decade of the twentieth century.

The concept of "Boston society” got me thinking about privilege and its opposite—hidden faces and forgotten stories and silenced, marginalized communities.

I’ve begun to research Sargent’s portraits, and the “society” patrons who commissioned them. As the US Census dutifully lists the names of a house’s entire range of inhabitants, it is possible to identify each member of a family’s support staff, a large, if largely invisible class of people who have captured my attention.

Many of these servants were women, and most were Irish. They struggled to be heard. (They battled to unionize.) They were parodied in the popular press where they were often called “Bridgets” and assumed, wrongly, to be illiterate. They worked long hours, received low wages, and wrote millions of letters to their friends and families back in Ireland. Live-in servants were frequently deprived of social lives outside the domicile in which they worked, and those letters home spoke volumes.

The titles of many of my paintings are taken from phrases I read in those actual letters. Four Dollars and The Black, Eighteen Working as Twenty, You’d be a Socialist, Too.

Decades after the passing of the Thirteenth Amendment in the United States, a culture of servitude continued to persist in the homes of the ultra wealthy. What made one woman an heiress and another a laundress? Who were these women dressed in crisp aprons instead of starched gowns, the liveried waitstaff echoing the pose, if not the pedigree of their elite, and arguably elitist employers? I’m trying to capture these people as Sargent might have done—had he opted to look below stairs.