Sarah Gooll Putnam

Sarah Gooll Putnam

• Sarah Gooll Putnam Diaries
• Find A Grave Memorial ID # 159972372

Putnam was an American painter. From a prominent Boston family, she was known for her portraits and landscapes.

Biography

Putnam was born in 1851 in Boston, Massachusetts. As a young girl she made sketches and later worked in oils and watercolors. She studied art in New York, Munich, and Holland, and painted portraits of family, friends, and other Bostonians of her social standing. She studied with Helen M. Knowlton, Louisa Crowninshield Bacon, and George Chickering Munzig before enrolling in the first class of students at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1877.

Putnam received her first portrait commission in 1883 and went on to have several one-woman shows, and was included in group shows at the St. Botolph Club, the Boston Art Club and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Putnam exhibited her work at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.

Putnam never married and she died in 1912 in Chocorua, New Hampshire.

“She was very happy always, and amused herself. A great part of her time was spent in imagining herself a horse, and prancing around the shrubbery—and in trying to be an Artist—For other recollections, I refer you to herself.” When Harriet Upham Putnam wrote this introductory memorandum to her daughter’s diary in 1861, she might not have imagined how fully Sally, then ten years old, would pursue both her artistic ambitions and her journal writing. At a time when few women were admitted to the ranks of professional artists, Sally Putnam grew up to become a respected portrait painter, patronized by Boston’s elite and featured in major exhibitions. Her diary, which she maintained for over fifty years, spans twenty-eight volumes, each extensively illustrated with drawings, watercolor paintings, and photographs that provide an extraordinary visual record of her life and her growth as an artist. The daughter of a prominent Boston family, Sally Putnam displayed a keen eye and an expressive talent from an early age. Her journal drawings offer remarkably frank, child’s-eye glimpses of nineteenth century life, ranging from sketches of her family, toys, and pets to depictions of the curiosities of P. T. Barnum’s Aquarial Gardens, processions of soldiers leaving to fight in the Civil War, and scenes from her family’s travels in both America and Europe.