Rose Standish
Not on view
A young woman wearing a plain black cap and gown with a white apron stands in a wood with clasped hands. Leaves on the ground indicate that it is autumn. The artist imagines Rose, wife of Miles Standish who led the religious non-conformists today remembered as the Pilgrims across the Atlantic on the Mayflower to found Plymouth Colony in what later became Massachusetts. Little is known about Rose, apart from the fact that she died during the colony's first winter in 1620, but Boughton's image invites us to imagine her journey to a new world. Poignantly, the leaves remind us how brief her stay in America actually was. The artist had himself been born in England and emigrated when an infant to a farm in upstate New York. When he decided to pursue an artistic career, he returned to Europe and settled in London, becoming known for evocative American colonial subjects and scenes set in seventeenth-century Holland.
