Born in Templeton, Massachusetts, on February 5, 1788, Sarah Goodridge attended district schools and briefly, at seventeen, a school in Milton, Massachusetts, where she had gone to live with the family of an elder brother. From an early age she had been interested in drawing. Opportunity for instruction in art did not exist, however, and as for material she was generally limited to drawing on birch bark with a pin or on a sanded floor with a stick. When her brother moved to Boston she accompanied him and there was given a few lessons by a man in his household. Until 1820 she lived alternately in Boston in winter and in summer in Templeton, where she taught school on occasion and began making and selling portraits in crayon and watercolor. She studied oil painting for a time, but a meeting with an artist from Hartford, who introduced her to miniature painting on ivory, settled her choice of medium.
From 1820 Goodridge lived in the home of her sister in Boston and worked steadily in miniature portraiture. Through a friend she met Gilbert Stuart, who criticized her work, gave her further instruction in technique, and in 1825 sat for a portrait that he declared the only true likeness ever done of him. Other famous subjects of her miniatures included Isaiah Thomas, General Henry Lee, Theophilus Parsons, Daniel Webster, and General Henry Knox, the last a copy of one made by Stuart for her instruction, the only miniature painted by him. Commissions given her over the next three decades were sufficient to support several members of her family in addition to herself. She exhibited her work on five occasions between 1827 and 1835 at the Boston Athenaeum, and in 1828╨1829 and again in 1841╨1842 she visited Washington, D.C., with her work. In the late 1840s her output began to decline from the two or three miniatures a week she had normally painted, and with the failure of her eyesight she gave up painting entirely in 1851 and settled in Reading, Massachusetts. She died in Boston on December 28, 1853.
