"Striking in its promise"
The Artistic Career of Sarah Gooll Putnam

ERIN L. PIPKIN

Image Gallery

PLATE 1. Amy Lowell (1874–1925). Oil on canvas. 1892. Courtesy of the Harvard University Portrait Collection, Gift of Mrs. Harold Russell to Harvard University for the use of Lowell House, 1933. Photo by Katya Kallsen. ©President and Fellows of Harvard College. Putnam painted poet Amy Lowell a year after Lowell's debut to Boston society. Eighteen-year-old Lowell had not yet reached the level of celebrity or notoriety that she would achieve in later years, but many Bostonians had already noted her unconventional manners. Putnam portrays Lowell in a typically conservative fashion that clearly conveys her elevated status in Boston society.
PLATE 2. Interior View. Watercolor sketch. January 1912, Volume 27, Sarah Gooll Putnam diaries, MHS. All following plates are from this same collection. After 1911, Putnam found it increasingly difficult to walk. Alternately bedridden or confined to a wheelchair, Putnam gratefully noted in her diary that she was still able to see well enough to paint. The watercolor sketches she completed during the last twelve months of her life show a boldness in color that she had never attained in earlier years, exemplified in this view of her bedroom.
PLATE 3. "Monday, Sept. 3rd, '83' Stoop—mountains behind." Unfinished watercolor sketch. September 3, 1883. Volume 15. Putnam often summered in the Adirondacks with a group of "plucky artistic people," as she called them (diary, Sept. 13, 1884, Vol. 15). In this sketch she depicts one of her friends playing the guitar.
PLATE 4. "View from Alice Tinkham's piazza at Wianno, Mass." Watercolor sketch. June 1911. Volume 27. Putnam frequently described the pleasure she took in the landscape when she wrote in her diaries about even the shortest trips. Although she left no record that she did any full-scale landscape painting, she painted many watercolor scenes of towns and countrysides.
PLATE 5. "Flowers sent me by Mrs. Channing Clapp." Watercolor sketch. October 1911. Volume 27. During the months of illness that preceded her death, Putnam painted many of the flower arrangements sent to her by concerned friends and family.
PLATE 6. "Innsbruck. View from little piazza balcony of Pension Kayser." Watercolor sketch and text. April 1888. Volume 18. When she went abroad without her family, Putnam wrote letters in the place of diary entries, then inserted the letters into her diary when she returned home.
PLATE 7. "Our jolly, plump, Dachan model—Munich '88,' '87.'" Watercolor sketch. Munich, 1887, 1888. Volume 17. The model in this sketch also appeared in one of Putnam's oil paintings. The pen-and-ink sketches Putnam drew in her diaries indicate her fascination with members of lower social classes as artistic subjects. Because the majority of her finished oil portraits were commissioned, only a very few of them reflect this interest.
PLATE 8. "Chocura—'1909.'" Watercolor sketch. June 1909. Volume 26. Putnam's diary entries for June 1909 describe her and her sister Mary Putnam Fearing's efforts to farm the land surounding their house in Chocorua, N.H. In this image a hired hand, probably Jerome Donovan, and "Mr. Hayford's team" ready a field for rye. This is only one of many sketches Putnam devoted to the study of working men.

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