Ann Hall

Ann (or Anne) Hall (1792–1863) was an American painter and miniaturist.

Ann Hall has been described as the most successful miniature painter active in early nineteenth-century New York, renowned for her engaging portraits, especially of children and young brides. Although many of her compositions strike modern audiences as sentimental, her popularity during her lifetime and the significance of her career are attested by the high prices paid for her miniatures (often five hundred dollars per commission) and her election to the National Academy of Design, New York. She has been credited for inspiring a renaissance in the technique of painting miniatures on ivory in the United States. Her considerable artistic talent was encouraged by her family and at a young age she was experimenting with several different techniques, including cutting silhouettes, modeling figures in wax, and executing flower pictures and still lifes in watercolor and pencil.

Education and early career Hall visited the home of her mother's family in Newport, Rhode Island with an elder sister. There she learned to sketch and paint in oil and make miniatures in watercolors on ivory from the Samuel King, one of the teachers of Gilbert Stuart.

In about 1808, Hall traveled to New York City to study oil painting with Alexander Robertson. During her tenure in his studio, she viewed the temporary exhibition of old master paintings from the collection of Colonel John Trumbull, painter and private secretary to John Jay, which had been amassed when Trumbull was active in London and Paris. As Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein has observed, what has been described by critics as the "glowing 'old master' color" of her miniatures resulted from her close study of early modern art.

Career By 1817, Hall was participating in exhibitions at the American Academy of the Fine Arts. Most of her early submissions were miniatures depicting family members, such as the group portrait "Ann Hall, Her Sister Eliza Hall Ward, and Her Nephew Henry Hall Ward" of 1828 presently in the collection of the New-York Historical Society. During the mid-1820s, she moved to New York City. She lived with her sister Eliza Hall Ward, who also was a painter of note, and Eliza's husband, Henry Ward, at their mansion at 23 Bond Street, although Hall made frequent trips to Boston. Eliza's home was a center of culture as well as the meeting place of the Hone Club. Many of the New York City luminaries of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s who visited Eliza and her husband posed for Ann, expanding the artist's circle of patrons and supporters. She was not encouraged to take an active role in the governance of the institution, however, and never appeared at Academy meetings except on one occasion when her presence was requested to meet a quorum. Yet she continued to exhibit in the institution's annual exhibitions until 1852, and a popular engraving produced by E. Gallaudet was made after Hall's miniature of Garafilia Mohalbi. and was ransomed by an American merchant who had her brought to Boston in 1827 to be raised with his family. Mohalbi died in 1830 at the age of 13.

Death Hall never married and died on December 11, 1863, in her sister's house, which became known as the Henry Hall Ward Mansion during the lifetime of Eliza's son. She was interred at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. It is estimated that Hall left her heirs an estate of $100,000, a fortune earned solely through commissions. Although surviving letters suggest that several amateur miniaturists petitioned to study in her studio, no students are recorded. Interest in her work was revived when the Henry Hall Ward Mansion was auctioned in December 1904 and several of her miniatures were discovered stored in the mansion's attic.