Edwin B. Child

The Club-house did not often see Edwin Burrage Child. For ten years he had made his home in Dorset, Vermont, where most of his artistic work was done and with which town he was identified, both in its civic affairs and in the local scenery which he painted. He was in fact quite as interested in restoring or remodeling old Dorset houses in the Colonial style as in pursuit of his own art; even his residence and studio were reconstructed out of two picturesque Dorset barns of another day. Nevertheless as landscape and portrait painter, and during a considerable period as illustrator for the monthly magazines, Child won something of nation-wide distinction. His landscapes were pleasing, more perhaps for their insight into hidden beauties of the scene than for imagination. His portraits depicted, among other notabilities, his fellow-Centurions Dwight Morrow, Lyman Abbott, and John Bassett Moore; they hang on the walls of numerous public and educational institutions. On the wall of our own rear billiard-room hangs one of Child’s best impromptu paintings—the exceedingly lifelike picture of our well-remembered fellow-Centurion, Francis Stoddard, with his cue about to make a master-stroke. One of his last canvases was the portrait of Henry T. Rainey—like Child, an Amherst graduate. Child was not in college during Rainey’s time; if he had been, he might have supplemented his painting of the potent, grave and reverend Speaker of the House with a picture of the prospective statesman as his Class of ’83 remembers him, clad in extremely tenuous garments, ready for a boxing-bout, and looking with supercilious defiance at all comers.

Alexander Dana Noyes
1938 Century Association Yearbook