Joseph T. Pearson Jr., Study in Gray

Pearson’s Study in Gray—a portrait of his wife, Emily Fetter—pays homage to artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s famous portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Gray and Black No 1 (1871). Through their titles, the artists bring attention to the formal and expressive properties of color as a unifying factor in their paintings. 

 After Emily’s death in 1948, Pearson married fellow artist Alice Kent Stoddard; both were dedicated volunteers at Woodmere.