Benjamin Greenleaf (1769 - 1821)

Thomaston Place Auction Galleries, Thomaston, Maine, 2009 Fall Feature Fine Art and Antique Auction, Day One, November 7, 2009, lot 61.

Leslie and Peter Warwick, Love At First Sight: Discovering Stories About Folk Art & Antiques Collected by Two Generations & Three Families, (New Jersey: 2022), pp. 253-4, fig. 425-7.

Benjamin Greenleaf (1769-1821) was an itinerant portrait painter, active in Massachusetts, Maine, and New Hampshire from 1803-1818. His oeuvre consists of 56 known works, with the majority being reverse paintings on glass as well as profiles of family members. Many reverse glass paintings did not survive due their fragile nature.

In 1806, Mary Leavitt Pratt was born in Wiscassett, Massachusetts, now Maine. Her relatives on both her father and mother’s side came to America in the 1630s, but her father, Calvin Pratt, died shortly after Mary’s birth and she and her mother, Abigail Hobart Pratt, moved back to her mother’s home town of Hingham, Massachusetts, where Mary attended the Derby Academy. The Derby Academy was founded in 1784 and is the oldest coeducational school that is still operating today. Mary married Stephen Berry in 1834 and moved to Garland, Maine, an inland town with rocky soil and a short growing season. She had seven children and died at the age of 56 in 1863.