Hattie Lee Kitt by Henry Byrd

Born in Ireland into a family of artists, Henry Byrd was an established painter in New Orleans by 1832. Byrd and his family settled in Arkansas for over twenty years, becoming one of Arkansas’s most prolific and preeminent portraitists. After occasional forays to New Orleans, Byrd moved there permanently in 1866, opened a studio, and exhibited his paintings in local galleries, including Lilienthal’s, Wagener’s and S. T. Blessing’s. In 1849 he wrote in a letter to a young artist:

Every little circumstances of form and perspective and light and shade, which are unnoticed by a common eye are important to the artist -- and produce altogether an emotion of delight more animated than the generality of mankind usually derives from it.

Little is known of Hattie Lee Kit, the little girl holding a porcelain doll in this portrait. The church in the background maybe St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square in the French Quarter in New Orleans. The Louisiana State Museum has one other portrait by Henry Byrd of the chaplain of the Confederate troops and of the First Presbyterian Church, Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer.

By the same artist:
Reverend Benjamin Morgan Palmer