Susanna Paine

Paine, an excellent student, attended school until she was 11 years of age, when she was needed to help care for her ill grandmother.

Her mother married widower Nathaniel Thurber on April 9, 1808, and the combined household, including his four children, moved to a Foster, Rhode Island, farm.

[4] At 15 years of age, Paine taught school and then attended "the best Academy in Rhode Island", which she financed through the sales of her needlework.

[4][nb 1] Paine learned how to paint with watercolor at the academy[6] and graduated with the highest honors; she was sufficiently trained "to teach any of the common branches of education.

[7] Paine resumed teaching and painted portraits to supplement her earnings, allowing her to support herself and send money to her mother, stepfather and their family, who had moved to Connecticut.

[8] I was very diligent: toiling incessantly at my easel, until the picture was finished: when I viewed it with great complacency, (artist like) and called Mrs. R., my patron and landlady, to look at it for the first time.

When lo, they all applauded, beyond my most sanguine hopes—or expectations.Paine worked as a professional portrait painter by traveling through New England and placing advertisements in local newspapers to solicit business.

Her anxiety over commissions, the constant threat of poverty and corresponding need for mobility in search of work, would have been familiar to contemporary American painters both male and female.Paine was "a woman of stalwart proportions, weighing over 200 pounds, and was a very original character..." She was also described as an idealist.

[13] Paine was subject to criticism for traveling alone as a woman,[14] but found it was safe to stay in boarding houses, secured through "several letters of introduction" from trusted people.

[15] To establish herself as a "genteel" artist, she studied art at the Boston Athenæum, stayed at upscale boarding houses, and became a published writer.

[16] Throughout her career, Paine generally made oil paintings on 1/2 inch wood panels of which the sides and back were washed in red, gray-green, or green-blue.

She had a tendency to paint the sitters with long hands, light flesh tones, doelike eyes and round faces.

[17] Paine was known to take liberties in the portrayal of her subjects; she once painted a gray-eyed man's portrait with black eyes because she thought they were more attractive.

[5] Not having received any leads for work, she placed a January ad with a testimonial, which said that her portrait's were a good likeness of the subject and well executed—and that women might find "a pride and pleasure in patronizing a female artist."

Paine answered a friend's request to return to Providence to paint her dying daughter, and still in poor health, stayed there several months.

[15] Paine, one of the first artists to paint on Cape Ann,[5] returned for several years, interrupted by visits to her mother each spring and fall.

[3] She found it to be a unique place: The scenery was delightful; and the people just to my liking... No one was very rich, and no one very poor; they all seemed on an equality... Kindness, benevolence and good will, were the most prominent traits of their lives, and characters.She raised a girl, who she called her adopted daughter, from 12 to 15 years of age.

Months later, after her half-brother sold the farm, Paine found them "looking sad and dejected" with Nathaniel in South Killingly, Connecticut, and made arrangements for her mother and step-father to live in an apartment.