The face only a folklorist could love

Portrait painters always strive to make their subjects beautiful, but sometimes they have so little to work with that there is no hiding the unfortunate physical traits that the sitters were born with. This portrait of a young boy is perhaps the most startling example in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. Painted about 1860, and measuring about 24” x 20”, he has to be the homeliest kid I have ever seen committed to canvas. The palette and composition don’t help, either. Painted in drab tones and standing on a non-descript Victorian chair, the painting just couldn’t be duller.


And yet, more compelling. Everyone who sees this likeness is drawn to it. The reaction is instantaneously emotional. Maybe out of pity; I'm not sure.

One of the conundrums about this piece is the question of how and why it entered our collection. We know from its accession number that it came to us in 1948, along with a group of folk art pieces acquired from the estate of Modernist sculptor Elie Nadelman. I blogged about the Nadelman acquisition in a post for the Fenimore Art Museum Blog some time ago, but I’ll briefly relate the story here.

The gist of it is that our former Director, Louis C. Jones, and our great benefactor, Stephen C. Clark, went to Riverdale-on-Hudson to view the estate in 1948. There was an entire house full of folk art; hundreds of pieces. Clark asked Jones if he could choose any 12, which ones would they be? Jones took some time and made his picks, to which Clark replied “I agree with you on 11 of them. Let’s buy 13.”

Given what I know about the respective tastes of Dr. Jones and Mr. Clark, I’m guessing that this boy was the one piece Clark would not have put on his list. Lou Jones, however, saw the qualities in this picture that art connoisseurs could not. Without strong colors or patterns or important details or evidence of masterful technique, this painting captures the personality of a child in ways that much better works don’t.

So what’s the lesson? You have to be open-minded enough to see these works through the eyes of people who are not necessarily art historians. Jones was a folklorist; he saw in this piece a forthright representation of the tastes and values of ordinary people. Clark, for his part, respected Jones' taste and conceded the choice.

The other lesson? Sometimes 13 can be a lucky number.

The Big Whig Banner

In an earlier post I talked about the profound impact of the Erie Canal on the folk art of New York State, focusing on the landscapes of Thomas Chambers. Among the other pieces in the Fenimore Art Museum collection that illustrate this phenomenon is our great Whig Campaign Banner by Terence Kennedy, painted in the 1840s. This piece came to us from the collection of Elie Nadelman, the modernist sculptor who collected folk art in the 1920s and 1930s and even opened one of the first folk art museums in the United States in Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, at the same time.

The Erie Canal, opened in 1825, revolutionized the way New Yorkers did business, as it allowed for much faster transportation of wares into and out of the state. Folk artists, like the trained landscape painters who preceded them, often depicted the canal, working from images that were disseminated through various print media and exploiting the new wonder visually for both its symbolic and aesthetic value.

Terence J. Kennedy (1820-after 1879) of Auburn, New York, included a vignette of the Erie Canal in our large campaign banner (about 70” wide) . This painting was probably the center section of a large rectangular banner carried in parades or at political gatherings during the 1840s. In this painting, the Erie Canal is of great importance – not only does it dominate the right side of the banner, but it helps to underscore the Whig belief that the development of coastal and internal transportation and the protection of home industries were vital interests to the growing Republic.

The banner also includes powerful symbols of a resurgent America poised to address its domestic challenges. Images of commerce, both maritime and land-based, appear in the ships at the left and the train at the right. Other symbols of agriculture and industry appear in the tools and equipment at the bottom of the canvas. Hovering over all of these images is, of course, a screaming bald eagle, representing the bold spirit of the country.

Heavy duty political propaganda, to be sure. But it is significant that the Erie Canal, which inspired a frenzy of canal construction in the northeastern United States, had come to symbolize America’s ingenuity and progress as a nation. Like so many other accomplishments of national importance, the canal was seized upon by political parties and used to every advantage. And folk artists like Terrence Kennedy readily and creatively supplied the images that Americans look to in order to decide the fate of the nation.