Deborah Goldsmith
Deborah Goldsmith was an American itinerant portraitist.
Life
Goldsmith was a native of North Brookfield, New York, but spent much of her adolescence in the neighboring town of Hamilton, at the home of her sister and brother-in-law, the Boons. She was the daughter of Richard and Ruth Miner Goldsmith, former residents of Guilford, Connecticut, who moved to Brookfield, New York, sometime between 1805 and 1808. Little is known of her life, or of her motivations for becoming an artist, although it is suspected that she was forced into the profession in order to support her parents. Goldsmith has been described as a "self-taught itinerant limner". No advertisements survive documenting her travels; however, her own records indicate that she was active in the New York communities of Brookfield, North Brookfield, Hamilton, Lebanon, Cooperstown, Hartwick, Toddsville, and Hubbardsville between 1826 and 1832. Most of her portraits were created between 1828 and 1832. That year she married George Addison Throop, a member of a family for whom she had produced work; their marriage followed a correspondence in which she expressed concerns about their differing religions, her age, and the fact that some of her teeth were false. The couple had two children before her death, following an illness of several weeks' duration.A book on the couple's family history, Ancestral charts of George Addison Throop, Deborah Goldsmith, was published in 1934.