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During the early nineteenth century, itinerant portrait makers such as Hopkins traveled from town to town providing inexpensive likenesses to a burgeoning middle class of farmers and merchants. Born in Connecticut, Hopkins worked as an ornamental painter before advertising his services as an art instructor and portrait painter in New York and later Ohio. His meticulous attention to laces and decorative accessories, and the small precise brushstrokes he used to model the faces of Agnes and her baby, befit Hopkins's training as an ornamental painter.