Relatively little is known about the portraitist O. S. Freeland. He was born in New York around 1820 and worked in Philadelphia in the 1840s and 50s, exhibiting at that city’s Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Here, Freeland portrays twenty-one-year-old Anna Marsh Quinton (born 1821), the daughter of Thomas and Margaret Quinton of Philadelphia. As was common practice in the nineteenth century, the picture was likely commissioned to celebrate a recent engagement, suggested by the ring on her betrothal finger in the foreground.
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