Two Connecticut Lives

When I first saw these small watercolors many years ago in the folk art galleries of the Fenimore Art Museum, I thought for sure that they were some kind of joke. A cartoon or caricature of an old woman smoking a pipe. Billows of smoke forming in front of her feisty face. Very hard to take seriously, until (as always) you learn more.

They depict the venerable Martha Barnes of Middletown, Connecticut, who was, as the inscription on one of the paintings indicates, 96 years old when they were done. Martha was blessed with a long life but not an easy one. She was born in 1738 and was married at the age of twenty to Jabez Barnes, a sailor. He was lost at sea in the West Indies in 1780, leaving Martha to raise the couple’s eight children. She did so, spending her entire life in Middletown. Martha died at the age of 96 in 1834, and was remembered as a strong-willed and devoutly religious woman who was absent from church only two half-days during the last twenty years of her life.

She had a grandson with a gift for painting but some challenges of his own. Lucius Barnes was born in 1819 to Martha’s son Elizur, and at the age of four contracted a spinal disease that left him with only the use of his hands and toes. He spent his childhood and young adulthood confined to a wheelchair.

At about the time of his grandmother’s death in 1834, Lucius painted about six watercolors of her in a couple of different poses: sitting and reading the Bible or standing with a cane and smoking what must have been a trademark pipe. Lucius died two years later, in 1836, at just seventeen.

It’s not entirely clear why Lucius painted these portraits, but one of them was discovered bound within a copy of John Cookson's book on Martha entitled "The Memoir of Martha Barnes, Late of Middletown, Connecticut"  (1834) It is possible that some of these nearly identical drawings may have served originally as frontispiece illustrations to this text.

In any case, what we should really see in these amusing little watercolors is not so much the humor inherent in the subject, although that is inescapable and harmless. Knowing the story behind the pictures, I now can’t help but see the intersection of two difficult lives, one long and one short, expressed with immutable affection, clarity and charm.

A Deaf Artist in Early America

Imagine what it must have been like to have your portrait painted in the early 19th century. First of all, before the camera was introduced via the daguerreotype in 1839, having a portrait painted was the only way to get a likeness of yourself. For most people, it was the only likeness they would obtain in their entire lifetime. It was, therefore, a pretty serious business, and its success depended on the rapport between the sitter and the artist.

This rapport was even more important when having portraits done of your children. In an era of high infant and child mortality, the act of portrait making took on a decided urgency. Early daguerreotypists used the phrase: “Secure the shadow, ere the substance fade.”

Considering all of the above, it is remarkable that the most successful folk portrait painter of children was a man who could neither speak nor hear. John Brewster, Jr. was born a deaf mute in 1766 in Connecticut, and grew up in a close circle of family and friends who probably learned to understand him through the use of improvised signs (American Sign Language had not yet been developed). In retrospect, it seems fortunate that he had artistic talent, for there was little else he would have been able to do.

Brewster learned to paint from a local portraitist and set off for Buxton, Maine with his physician brother in 1805. Within months he was painting elegant, serene portraits of some of Maine’s most prominent citizens. But his portraits of children are his most stunning works of art. The youngsters he paints float angelically on the canvas, with large, expressive eyes looking up at the viewer with yearning and fascination. His portraits of Franics O. Watts (top right) and "One Shoe Off" (lower left) are in the Fenimore Art Museum. The portrait of Comfort Starr Mygatt and His Son George (above left) and his half sister Sophia Brewster (above right) are in private collections.

Kids must have loved Brewster, and he must have had a special fondness for them too. Ironic, considering he never married nor did he have children of his own. What little we know of Brewster’s personality, from the1791 diary of a family friend, the Reverend James Cogswell, hints at him being a particularly engaging young man; “Brewster, the Deaf & D. young Man was at my House when I came Home. He tarried & dined here – he appears to have a good Disposition & an ingenious Mind. I could converse little with him, being not enough acquainted to understand his Signs. I pity Him - & feel thankful to God for the Exercise of my Senses.”

In his landmark book, A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster, Jr., scholar Harlan Lane strongly suggests that Brewster’s deafness enhanced his powers of observation. Likewise, the presence of so many sensitively rendered faces with large eyes point to the importance of the face and particularly the gaze in communication among the deaf. In Brewster’s portraits we see the world literally through the eyes of a deaf man.

That’s the scholar’s point of view, and a valid one. But as I was leading a tour group through a Brewster exhibition we had at the Fenimore Art Museum a few years ago, I got a mom’s perspective. When I was pondering Brewster’s portraits of children she piped up and said; “Well, if he couldn’t hear the racket the kids made, he probably had more patience with them.”

I just smiled. When it comes to medicine or art history, you can’t out-diagnose a mom.

Did F.H. Sweet Really Paint with his Feet?

Here’s a good Curatorial Tall Tale from the research files. We have had this painting of the Buck Farm by F.H. Sweet in our collection since 1961. I’ve never exhibited it, but recalled reading somewhere that there was something unusual about the artist. Just today I went back to the file and found a note from 1964, which read:

This week a lady visitor told the guide that she was adopted into the Buck family at the age of five years and lived in this house until her marriage. She remembers Mr. Sweet, the artist, who came along the road one day and asked to paint the house. He was born without arms and painted this and another just like it, with his feet.

True story. Not.

Some years later one of the students in the Cooperstown Graduate Program conducted interviews with Buck family members and even found Sweet’s niece living just a short distance away in Mohawk, New York, near Utica. Here’s what the student found out:

Frank H. Sweet was born in Middleville, about 10 miles north of Mohawk, date unknown but most definitely with both arms intact. As a youth his right side was paralyzed by an overdose of medicine. He worked in Glens Falls as a bookkeeper for a time, and then moved back to the Mohawk Valley. At some point he started painting for a living, getting buggy rides from the family he lived with and apparently painting or sketching local farms from the buggy, using his left hand. He died before 1940 and is buried in Middleville Cemetery in Herkimer County.

This painting of the Buck Farm (seen in its entirety at the top) was painted in Salisbury Center, just a few miles north of Mohawk, about 1915. Mr. Buck was a builder of stone fences and used oxen to haul the stone. The object on the red barn (seen in the detail above) is a pair of ox horns. Buck also ran a slaughterhouse, processing the meat in the red barn and storing in the barn on the left side of the painting.

And so Frank H. Sweet joins a long list of folk artists with disabilities that have been documented traveling the back roads of 19th-century America plying their trade, including such legendary figures as John Brewster, Jr. and Joseph Whiting Stock. It says a lot about early 20th-century sensibilities that he was remembered as a kind of sideshow figure, supposedly painting with is feet. Good solid research has put his brush back in his hand, where it belongs. And it won’t be long before this painting goes up on the walls of our folk art gallery here at the Fenimore Art Museum.