Description:Three-quarter length portrait of Elizabeth Irwin (McGavock) Harding as a mature woman with dark hair parted in center and pulled back; wearing a black dress with white collar with brooch, fitted bodice, and full skirt; her right elbow propped on a red cushion; her left hand holding a book; cloudy sky and red drapery in background.
History:The painting was perhaps commissioned around the same time as John and Susannah Harding’s portraits in 1846, by W.B. Cooper or Washington Bogart Cooper. Cooper was a famous artist out of Tennessee. W.B. Cooper was born September 18th 1802 in Washington County, Tennessee. His younger brother William Browning Cooper was also a famous portraitist. Neither Cooper boy had any sort of formal training as children. William Cooper was known to have said, “We commenced our artistic careers under circumstances most unfavorable to artistic culture– no schools of art, no pictures, nothing to stimulate us in our chosen pursuit.” It was about 1828 Washington Cooper was discovered by a fellow unnamed artist. It was also around this same time that the budding artist moved to Nashville. After a brief training in Philadelphia he began to advertise for sittings, and began a lifelong pace of about 35 portraits a year, earning him the title, “The man of a thousand portraits.” It was at the height of his career in the 1840s and 1850s that he would have painted the portraits for the Harding family. One of his last works was a self–portrait in 1885, which was given to the Tennessee Historical Society. Washington Bogart Cooper died of pneumonia March 30th 1888.
Notes:Elizabeth Irwin McGavock was born 1818 to Randal and Sarah Rodgers McGavock. She grew up at the family’s Carnton Plantation in Franklin, Tennessee. On January 2, 1840 Elizabeth McGavock married William Giles Harding. Of Elizabeth’s nine pregnancies only two children would survive into adulthood, two daughters, Selene and Mary. She was considered to be a woman of strong will and it was said to be her strong Christian faith in the First Presbytarian Church that would see her hard and emotional times. During the Civil War, while her husband was imprisoned in Michigan, Elizabeth defended the properties, kept the plantation running, and the needs of her family and the servants on the property. It was thought that this unselfishness and devotions to others without concern for her own health contributed to her decline and eventually her death on August 8th 1867, at the age of 48. Location: Front Parlor
