By the age of nineteen, Field had displayed sufficient talent in sketching portraits to be admitted as a student at the studio of Samuel F. B. Morse in New York.

Field made a good living as a limner or itinerant portrait painter in the 1830s, traveling in western Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley.

[2][4] In the 1840s, the family settled in Greenwich Village in New York City, where Field exhibited a few paintings and is thought to have taken up the new art of photography.

He learned from David Acheson Woodward to use the latter's 1857 solar camera to make enlargements from collodion negatives of portraits onto photo-sensitized canvas which he would over-paint in oils.

[1][2] Following the death of his wife in 1859, Field and his daughter moved to the settlement of Plumtrees in Sunderland, where he built a studio and continued to paint biblical scenes and Romantic landscapes.