Girl in White with Cherries

It is only through the annals of family recollection that the young girl holding a basket of cherries in this painting is thought to have been Jewish. Eliza, daughter of the New Jersey portraitist Micah Williams who authored this picture, told her grandniece, Anna Morgan, that this painting had been commissioned by a Jewish family, and that the girl had died in the cholera epidemic that devastated New York in 1832. Upon presenting the painting to the Zimmerli Museum in 1959, Anna recorded a memorandum with all of the family lore pertaining to the portrait.

Girl in White with Cherries

1831