In 2027 the Colonial Society of Massachusetts will publish a digital transcription of the Ruth Henshaw Bascom Papers, 1789-1846, transcribed by Mary Eileen Fouratt and edited by Maureen Egan and Sally Hadden. The original RHB Papers are held at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts and consist of a remarkable 6,000 page diary that spans 57 years (with 8 years missing). Ruth Henshaw Bascom (RHB) (1772-1848) was a prolific and original self-taught artist creating more than 1,700 cut-paper, bust length, pastel and paint portraits in profile of children and adults in nearly forty towns in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Maine, primarily from 1828-1846. Approximately 239 survive, 96 of which are held in dozens of museums, historical societies and libraries, including the National Gallery of Art, Historic Deerfield, Worcester Art Museum, Old Sturbridge Village, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Winterthur, and the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum. The remainder are in private collections.
Ruth began the diary at age sixteen and continued until age 74, a year-and-a-half before her death. The diaries contain a wealth of information on her day-to-day life in central Massachusetts on the verge of the industrial revolution as a member of a large and busy household. It follows her observations as she becomes a teacher, milliner, doctor’s wife, stepmother, widow, minister’s wife and stepmother to her second husband’s daughter and later a nephew, and eventually an inventive portrait artist.
A number of scholars have mined parts of her diaries for research and articles. A small portion of the diary was published in 1979 by A. G. Roeber, A New England woman’s perspective on Norfolk, Virginia, 1801-1802: Excepts from the diary of Ruth Henshaw Bascom. In the 1980s Catherine Fennelly transcribed fourteen years 1801-1814 (no diary for 1811), unpublished, which are now at AAS.
The first three years of the diaries (1789-1791) transcribed by Mary Eileen Fouratt are on the American Antiquarian Society website under the Historic Children’s Voices project. Fouratt began working with the diaries for a senior thesis at the College of the Holy Cross. In 2022 she brought in her project partner, Maureen Egan to work with the diaries during their Baron Fellowship at the AAS in 2022 in order to transcribe and complete a catalog raisonné of RHB’s artwork.
