Portrait of Caroline Perley Fellows (1832–1885), Aged Fifteen
Hanover, New Hampshire, 1848
Oil on canvas, 20 x 23 inches; period gilt frame, 27 x 30 inches
Signed, dated, and inscribed verso

Caroline Perley Fellows was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1832, the daughter of Isaac Fellows Jr. and Anna Porter Perley Fellows. She grew up in an established, prosperous farming family with deep roots in Hanover; her father was a farmer and landowner, while other members of the household were teachers. In 1857 Caroline married farmer Richard Bartlett Eastman. She remained in the Hanover area throughout her life and died in nearby Lebanon in 1885. The remarkably faint inscription on the reverse identifies the sitter, records her age and the date 1848, and names the artist: “A. Tenney Pinxt.”

Adna Tenney was a New Hampshire-born portrait painter whose career took him throughout New England and later to New Jersey. After studying in Boston in the 1840s, he worked as an itinerant portraitist; examples of his work are held by Dartmouth College and the New Hampshire Historical Society. Tenney’s connection to Caroline was personal as well as professional: his first wife, Emeline Hale Perley, was the younger sister of Caroline’s mother, making the young sitter his niece by marriage. Another documented Tenney portrait, painted in 1853, bears the same distinctive “A. Tinney Pinxt.” inscription on the reverse.

Verso inscription: Caroline P. Fellows … Aged 15 … A. Tenney Pinxt.

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