This is not a witch

Ceci n'est pas une sorcière*

*with apologies to Magritte

This portrait, known only as “Mrs. Baker,” was painted circa 1675 by an unknown artist in London and later shipped to a granddaughter, Elizabeth Shrimpton, who had migrated to Massachusetts and married a prosperous merchant. It is now in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.

Oddly, this picture has become the face of an American witch: it's proliferated all over the Web, incorrectly identified as Mary Bliss Parsons (1628-1712) who stood trial for witchcraft in 1675 in Northampton, Massachusetts.

The fact is, there are no portraits of Mary Bliss Parsons. We don’t even know what she looked like, although she was said to be attractive: "possessed of great beauty and talents, but not very amiable," in the words of one historian.

So how did the respectable Mrs. Baker of London end up being identified with an accused witch in Massachusetts?

The confusion seems to have originated with a website, The Goody Parsons Witchcraft Case, created jointly in 2003 by Historic Northampton and the University of Massachusetts' Center for Computer-Based Technology. It's actually a great resource, offering an in-depth look at the Parsons case, with a comprehensive overview of witch hysteria in colonial America, and numerous links for educators. Unfortunately, the site's designers chose to illustrate it with various colonial-era images that they didn't bother to caption or identify. So it is that Mrs. Baker's picture appears prominently at the top of a page sporting the dramatic quote, “Your grandmother is a witch and your mother is half a witch.” Viewers may be forgiven for concluding the portrait is that of the accused witch, Mary Parsons.

The same site uses this portrait of a mother and child, which stirred dim memories from my college art history class. It’s actually a well-known early American portrait, "Mrs Elizabeth Freake and Baby Mary.” But its placement invites viewers to jump to the conclusion that this is another portrait of Goody Parsons. It’s now regularly paired with Mrs. Baker’s portrait, supposed to be another depiction of Mary Bliss Parsons.

Witness the discussion below, found at Ancestry.com:

And some enterprising soul has actually taken Mrs. Baker's image and altered it to look like this:

(Because if it says “Mary Bliss” in old-fashioned writing, it must be authentic, right?)

This doctored version keeps popping up on the web, including a recent appearance at Mary Bliss Parsons’ Find a Grave memorial.

No one seems to be actively maintaining the Goody Parsons website at the moment. A message I sent to the webmaster listed at cs.umass.edu bounced back, and email inquiries to Historic Northampton have gone unanswered. Many pages contain the term "mockup" in their URL, suggesting the project was not completely finished when it went live. In 2007, blogger Erika Mailman was told that the group had run out of time and money before they could add captions. Grace Bliss Smith, secretary of the Bliss Family History Society, also made an inquiry a few years later and reported the following: “Here is what Historic Northampton sent me when I asked for verification: ‘The image is not a portrait of Mary Bliss Parsons. There is no known portrait of her. The painting on the site is titled Mrs. Baker and dates to 1675.’ ”

Mrs. Baker, the English gentlewoman, now seems doomed to serve as the face of the American witch. Her portrait graced the cover of a 2013 edition of "Annals of Witchcraft" published by the New England Historic and Genealogical Society. Try putting that genie back into the bottle...

The Goody Parsons website remains an excellent historical source. It's possible it may be responsible for a recent uptick of interest in Mary Bliss Parsons, (who has been the subject of no fewer than three novels published in the last three years). You can’t really fault the web designers for wanting to illustrate the story with more-or-less contemporary images: Mrs. Baker in her pointy black hat was probably irresistible. It’s just too bad no one took the time to identify the illustrations.

After all, Mrs. Baker was hardly the first 17th-century dame to sport a capotain. If you're looking for a lady in a tall black hat, there are plenty of contemporary portraits to choose from:

Or if you want someone with an actual connection to Mary Bliss Parsons, the possibilities are almost endless. Her descendants today number in the thousands. Some of them are quite famous:

This is not a real person (although some think the stereotypical witch's hat derived from anti-Quaker sentiment).

But the Quaker Oats Company was founded by Henry Parsons Crowell, a descendant of Mary Bliss Parsons.

Or there's this guy.

Yup, he's a Parsons descendant, too.