Portrait of Henry Wood Booth

Robert Wickenden, like his subject, Henry Wood Booth, was born in Kent, in England. After emigrating to Ohio as a child in the1870s, Wickenden trained successively as a photographer, printmaker, and painter in oils. Though little remembered today, in his lifetime, he enjoyed both popularity and critical acclaim as a painter. He led an itinerant lifestyle, travelling frequently between England, France, Canada, and the United States. Wickenden supplemented his income by dealing in art, selling to American buyers such as Henry Clay Frick and Detroit’s Charles Lang Freer.

It was his work as a dealer that brought Wickenden to Detroit. James Scripps, father of Cranbrook’s co-founder, Ellen Scripps Booth, bought several artworks from Wickenden, sought his advice on other purchases that would form part of the founding collection of the Detroit Museum of Art (now the DIA), and commissioned his own portrait. While Wickenden was at work on Scripps’s portrait, George Booth also commissioned this picture of his father, Henry Wood Booth, painted in December 1907.

Depicted just weeks before his seventieth birthday, the senior Booth looks out at us over the rims of his reading glasses; an open book and writing utensils on the table beside him suggest that he is in the midst of composition. In his later years, Henry Booth was a diligent diarist, who also wrote at length on his two primary interests, theology and teetotalism.

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

Gregory Wittkopp
Director
Cranbrook Center for Collections and Research
April 2019