an American folk art painter of portraits, landscapes, and history pictures. By the age of nineteen, Field had displayed sufficient talent in sketching portraits to be admitted as a student at the studio of Samuel F. B. Morse in New York. Morse closed his studio some three months later, and Field returned to Leverett in 1825. His earliest known painting is a portrait of his grandmother, Elizabeth Billings Ashley, painted around 1826. Field married Phebe Gilmur in Ware, Massachusetts, in 1831. They had one daughter, born in 1832. Field made a good living as a limner or itinerant portrait painter in the 1830s, traveling in western Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley.
