Portrait of Henry Wood Booth

Ossip Perelma was a rising star of American portraiture in 1918, when George Gough Booth and his brother Ralph Harman Booth invited him to Cranbrook to paint portraits of their father, Henry Wood Booth, and their mother, Clara Gagnier Booth. Perelma, born Iosif Perelman, was a Russian Jewish painter who trained under Ilya Repin at the Imperial Academy of Art in Saint Petersburg. Having left Russia in the wake of the 1917 revolution, Perelma quickly drew the attention of the American art scene for his vivid and briskly-painted portraits of a series of influential public men. George and Ralph Booth likely commissioned the portraits of their parents partly in order to secure an example of Perelma’s work for the Detroit Institute of Art, as this painting was gifted to the DIA shortly after its completion. It was returned to the Cranbrook Foundation in 1955.

Henry Wood Booth is shown seated in a 17th-century oak chair, placed under the trees in the grounds of Cranbrook House. The choice of an outdoor setting is unusual, but not unique; the previous year, Perelma had painted a portrait of Frank Brett Noyes, owner of the Washington Evening Star seated in his own garden (National Portrait Gallery, Washington D. C.). The open book on his lap identifies him as a scholar, while his attire and lush surroundings indicate that he is a gentleman of leisure as well.

Mariam Hale
2023-2025 Collections Fellow
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
March 2024