More Treasures from the Katcher Collection

Rachel Ann Maria (Overbaugh) Ostrander and Titus Ostrander

Attributed to Ammi Phillips (1788-1868)

Saugerties, New York, circa 1834-1835

Oil on canvas, 58 x 44 inches, original veneered frame

This is one of the greatest folk portraits ever painted. Ammi Phillips was one of the most successful and prolific portrait painters of the nineteenth century, plying his trade in New York’s Hudson River Valley and Western New England for more than half a century.  This striking, elegant likeness of Rachel Ostrander and her son Titus is his largest known work and generally considered one of his best.  The beauty and timeless serenity of the image belies the adversity faced by the principal sister in the decade following the completion of this painting.  Rachel Overbaugh married Stephen Nottingham in 1827, when she was just seventeen.  They had Titus shortly thereafter, and another child just after this portrait was painted (interesting to note how Phillips helped her hide her pregnancy).  When Stephen died in 1840 Rachel married her first cousin, Solomon Overbaugh in 1842.  Their child Peter was one year old when Solomon died in 1844, and Rachel married her third husband, Captain William Teunis Swart, in 1846.

The Eyes Have It

On my recent trip to Dallas to attend the opening of the Fenimore Art Museum's Thaw Collection of American Indian Art at the Dallas Museum of Art, I came across this curious painting at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. It struck me as another fine example of an itinerant folk artist's penchant for depicting sitters as they were, rather than as an idealized version of themselves.

Ammi Phillips was a prolific painter in the valleys and towns of eastern New York State and western New England in the first half of the nineteenth century. He is well known for employing stock poses in order to speed up production of his portraits. But he did so with such fluid and graceful brushwork that the paintings are elegant and refined even in their sameness. And his sitters didn't seem to mind that they looked like so many others' portraits that they must have seen in their villages.

Yet despite this sameness, Phillips often captured something unique to each sitter. In this case, it was an obvious crossed eye. This young girl and her parents must not have seen this condition as a major flaw, for by all indications they accepted this finished portrait and it descended in the girl's family.

It's entirely possible that some might look at this painting, not having seen Phillips' work before, and attribute the crossed eye to a lack of painting skill. That view is problematic for many reasons, chief among them is this: the cat's eyes are perfect.

Portrait of a Dullard as a Long-Winded Preacher

Most museum labels don't provide a lot of insight. It seems that many curators are content with sharing only the basic data on a piece, like the title, artist, date, and medium. Oh, and the donor. It's rare to read any thoughts or opinions on the part of the people who know these works best.

This painting, which I saw in my trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts back in February, was an exception. The label struck me as a clever bit of insight into this guy, who was painted by the itinerant folk artist Ammi Phillips in Troy,New York, in about 1820.

His name was Jonas Coe, and he was a Presbyterian minister. According tot he label, a writer from the time period left us with our only verbal picture of Reverend Coe: "Great in character rather than in intellect, wit, or eloquence." Translation: boring and long-winded.

The curators who wrote the label astutely point out the visual clues to this man's lack of ability to engage his parishioners. His right hand is open and arm extended as if lamely making a point, and the fingers of his left hand mark the page in his Bible that is no doubt the source of his sermon. As the label points out, a "pedantic" style rather than an inspired one.

The last line of the label, which addresses the Rev. Coe's face, is priceless. "His dour expression augurs sterns and lengthy sermons." I wonder how many of these Ammi Phillips had to sit through in order to be able to express so beautifully the dullard's countenance and gestures. 

The Eyes Have It

This is one of the oddest oddball images in the history of American folk art, but it is an offshoot of a portrait tradition that is very common. Ammi Phillips, the artist, was one of the most prolific painters of his generation. He was born in Connecticut in 1788, and by 1811 he was establishing himself as a portrait painter in eastern New York State. Phillips had a penchant for finding newly prosperous middle-class entrepreneurs, those who came to the then-wilds of New York after the Revolutionary War to start settlements and take advantage of the plentitude of timber and water power. Over the course of his fifty-year painting career, Phillips would create likenesses of this generation as well as that of their children and grandchildren who had more genteel pursuits. He died in 1865.

Here is a Phillips portrait of a mother and child that we have in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. You can see why he was so popular. These paintings are simple and elegant, with solid colors and graceful lines. We think this portrait was painted sometime in the 1820s.

The portrait of the physician (in a private collection) is also from this period, but it is in a class by itself for what it shows. Of course, Phillips' patrons were justly proud of their accomplishments, and often had him include references to the source of their prosperity in their portraits. In this case, a simple book just wouldn't do. The good doctor here had to have his portrait painted in the act of a surgical procedure, in this case a surgery to repair a cataract. Honestly, I didn't even know that this type of surgery was performed in the 1820s, but here it is.

If you want to know more, you should be aware of the article "Folk Art Portraiture of Early American Surgeons," by Ira M. Rutkow, MD, published in Archives of Surgery in July 1999, available here by subscription to the journal. Otherwise, just enjoy this unusual painted document of 19th-century medicine and be glad you were born much later.