Description:Three-quarter length seated portrait of Susannah Shute Harding as a mature woman wearing lace cap, lace shawl, and black dress; her arms crossed in her lap.
History:Signed and dated, “W.B. Cooper 1846” middle right. Verso inscribed “From death mask – posthumously.” The painting was commissioned after Susannah’s death in 1845. W.B. Cooper or Washington Bogart Cooper was a famous artist out of Tennessee. 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:Susannah Shute was born August 22nd 1785 to Philip and Elizabeth Waller Shute at Thorn Bottom, the family’s property outside of Laurel Hill, Pennsylvania. The Shute family moved to the Mero District of North Carolina, what is now Middle Tennessee in 1790. Susannah married John Harding on August 6th 1806. She gave birth to six children, of which three survived into adulthood, Amanda, William Giles, and Elizabeth. In 1839 Susannah and John moved to Nashville proper into a townhouse at 85 Spring Street near the church where they worshipped the Vine Street Christian Church. On September 12th 1845 Susannah died at the age of 60. Location: Back Parlor
