Boy in Red

These companion portraits are two of nine known likenesses painted by Phillips in the 1830s depicting small children in nearly identical dresses—stock garments that saved the artist time. Of the nine, three are boys, and all but two hold a strawberry plant, whose red, almost heart-shaped fruit perhaps connotes love. Because young boys and girls were dressed similarly in the nineteenth century, it is sometimes difficult to ascertain the sex of a child in a portrait. Often the primary clues are the accoutrements, such as the hammer in Boy in Red.