The Cushing Parlor

Ella Emory (dates unknown)
Hingham, Massachusetts, 1878
Oil on canvas
15  X 20 in.
Museum purchase with funds provided by an anonymous gift
1994.21

For some New Englanders home was the place their parents, grandparents, and many generations before them had lived. In 1878 Ella Emory, her sister, and her niece, Alice Cushing, spent the summer at their family’s seventeenth-century ancestral home in Hingham, Massachusetts. During the visit Emory painted this view of the west parlor with Alice seated on a sofa, two kittens curled up nearby, and a mishmash of furnishings accumulated over the decades.