Mrs. William Young (née Martha Wetherill, 1833–1900)

On view in the American Art before 1900 galleries

Martha Wetherill was a member of a prominent Free Quaker family in Philadelphia. In 1852 she married William Washington Young, with whom she later had four children. Perhaps their union occasioned the commission of this miniature, painted by her brother-in-law, George Hewitt Cushman. The Wetherill family established close ties with Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). On the subject of religious faith, Stowe wrote to Martha in 1858, “Where our Heavenly Father sees an obedient & confiding spirit he in his own good time will reveal to it the truth as it is—in this world or the next.” These words might have provided comfort to Martha, whose husband had died a year earlier.