Little Miss Hone

On 6 December 1824 Samuel Morse wrote to his wife about a new commission in New York. He was painting a full-length portrait of the little daughter of Isaac Hone, a wealthy auctioneer, a pretty girl just as old as their own Susan, and he had already decided how. She would have a cat set up in her lap like a baby, with a towel under its chin and a cap on its head, and she would be feeding it with a spoon. That is the picture he made. Five-year-old Mary Hone wears a fancy hat, an elegant gown and a shawl, and sits among fashionable Greek Revival furniture, all of it a sign of her family's money. Morse had spent four years studying in London, and he knew the British taste for sentimental pictures of children. There, painters such as Joseph Wright of Derby had shown little girls fussing over a kitten as if it were a baby. Morse brought the game to a New York parlour, with the child rehearsing her future part as a mother. The letter that describes the plan is kept in the museum's archives.