BAKER, Miss Barbara

The sitter came from Detroit, and was a niece of a Mrs. Hamilton Carhartt (Annette Welling of Jackson, Missouri), whose husband (born 1859) founded a men’s working clothing company there in 1889; they had a residence at 927 Fifth Avenue in 1921; both were killed in an automobile accident in 1937. The artist records in his diary for January 7, 1936 leaving for Detroit, which he records he began the following day, and continued with the sittings until January 13 when he decides to return to New York and to finish the work in the Spring, though he says he works on the shoulders on January 17, 1936. Therefore the sitter was presumably Barbara Carhartt Baker who was born on 27^th July 1912 and died, aged 91 in Grosse Pointe, MI, on 2^nd April 2004. When Duveen’s client Anna Thompson Dodge opened her mansion at Rose Terrace in Grosse Pointe in 1936 Mrs. Carhartt was also a guest; they effectively were neighbours.

She may be the Barbara Baker who married W.L. Row of Rye, NY in Detroit in September 1936. She may have also married a Crow, but at some time later (after a divorce?), returned to her maiden name.