RALPH EARL 1751-1801
The Striker Sisters, 1787
Oil on canvas, 37 X 27" (93.98 X 68.58 cm.)
Signed, lower left
Museum purchase, 950-0-102

A though designated on his birth certificate as "Earll" and born to parents who wrote their name "Earle," the painter and his artist-brother James always signed their name "Earl." Ralph Earl was a contradictory artist. Like John Singleton Copley, the most important influence on his work, the self-taught Earl created a personal portrait vision
which developed the limner tradition by incorporating sophisticated effects of texture and reflection without sacrificing its strength of shape and pattern. He was also a Tory who, before and after he fled to England, was one of the most important chroniclers of the young Republic. Earl's portrait masterpiece Roger Sherman (c. 1775, Yale University Art Gallery) depicts one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence. In the same year, his four views of
the Battles of Lexington and Concord became perhaps the first historical landscapes in America. Earl, a Loyalist, departed for England in 1778, fearing for his personal safety. In London he associated with Benjamin West, although never officially becoming West's pupil. Earl returned to America-on the same boat as John Trumbull-in May, 1785. After spending almost a year and a half in debtor's prison in New York, Earl regained his status as the most prominent Connecticut painter of the Revolutionists.
The Striker Sisters is one of about twenty known works painted while Earl was in debtor's prison. From September, 1786, until his release on January 29, 1788, he resided in New York's City Hall jail. What might have been a nightmarish episode was first alleviated and later ended by the passage of An Act for the Relief of Insolvent Debtors, April 13, 1786, and the formation of a Society for the Relief of Distressed Debtors, January, 1787. Members of this society sent their wives, children, and friends to be painted by the prisoner, thus furnishing him with the means to secure release. Earl's most famous sitter during his confinement was Elizabeth Schuyler, daughter of one of George Washington's generals and wife of Alexander Hamilton. While incarcerated, Earl also painted many of the presiding officers from his trial.
Once mistakenly identified as twins, Ann, age six, on the left, and Winifred, age five, were the daughters of James and Mary Hopper Striker, who owned a farm at Striker's Bay, what is now 52nd Street and the Hudson River. Earl occupies an important place in the early development of American landscapes, both for individual topographical images and for the rich backgrounds of many of his portraits. Showing minimal foliage, the background of The Striker Sisters is, for Earl, uncharacteristically bleak and barren, almost a metaphor of his own situation. Nevertheless, the rocky buildup on the right necessarily balances out the suggestive leftward lean of the principal figures, which follows the syncopated sequencing of their blue sashes.
The Striker Sisters demonstrates that, in contrast to Copley, Earl never exchanged his characteristic polished awkwardness for a broader European fluency during his English sojourn. Delicately poised like a dance team, the Striker sisters show, a touching closeness, especially in light of their mother's premature death one year earlier. The only other double child portrait of Earl's showing such an intimate pair is David and Sarah Hubbell (1787, private collection, Long Island). As with many of Earl's subjects, the Striker sisters manifest several arresting and distinctive irregularities. Their front hands, which meet in the middle of the picture, are actually painted smaller than the further ones which, frame their embrace. The quirky characterization of the sisters, with their flattened heads, short fringes, and feral eyes, gives the work a strongly expressive quality. As usual, Earl has wrapped his eccentric depiction of physiognomy and personality in impressive effects of painterly virtuosity, such as the pink silk slips that show through the gauzy white embroidered exterior of the sisters' dresses.

JAMES THOMPSON