Southpaw

Joseph H. Davis was a terrific folk portrait painter in miniature, but only one fact is known about him. Despite a body of work that includes more than one hundred and sixty exquisite watercolor portraits of southern New Hampshire and Maine residents, there are no vital records, advertisements, or directory listings that attest to his life and career. Various theories abound, including the notion that he was the legendary "Pine Hill Joe" of Newfield, Maine, a man remembered as a farmer and incurable wanderer who was always dabbling with paints and earned only $1.50 for each portrait rendered.

We have three portraits by Davis, and this one is the best. It depicts Azariah and Eliza Caverly of Strafford, New Hampshire along with their two children, George and Sarah. Azariah was a farmer who also must have experimented with architectural drawing, as evidenced by the detailed drawing on his table and the carpenter's square held by his son. The Caverly family genealogy describes Azaraiah as a man "full of aspirations; ingenious and frugal." Ingenious, maybe, as a farmer who also designed buildings. Frugal? Judging by the lavishly decorated chairs, lively patterned carpet, and garlanded painting, I have to wonder.

Anyway, that one fact about Davis that is known? On one of his paintings, an 1830s portrait of Bartholomew Van Dame, Davis signed his name "Joseph h. Davis/Left Hand Painter." How interesting that this survives as his sole identifier. Given the prevailing attitudes toward left-handers in the early 19th century (left-handedness was "corrected" well into the 20th century), he might as well have painted with his feet. The signature certainly suggests that being left-handed was a big part of Davis' identity, and he wanted at least one sitter to know it. For good measure, he also added a lot of flourish to the inscriptions along the bottom of his portraits. Yes, left-handers could write as beautifully as anyone. I know this first-hand, being left-handed myself.

For more images of Davis' work, see the following post from the wonderful "It's About Time" blog.

Signed,
Paul S. D'Ambrosio
Left Hand President

Wandering Thugs of Art

There are a lot of great period quotes that give us a good idea of how nineteenth-century writers regarded the works of folk artists. Most, if not all, of the quotes are disparaging to the point of hilarity. This particular example is noteworthy for its source, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the physician and writer who wrote prose and poetry alongside Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the other Fireside Poets, and published many of his works in The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that he helped to found. His son and namesake, of course, became a famous Supreme Court Justice in the early twentieth century and wrote such iconic majority decisions as his "clear and present danger" opinion in 1919's Schenck v. United States.

But it is the opinions of the elder Holmes that concern us today, and it appears that he felt the works of folk portraitists were a clear and present danger to American society. Here is what he had to say about these traveling artists in The Atlantic Monthly in July of 1861:

"[these are the] wandering Thugs of Art whose murderous doings with the brush used frequently to involve whole families; who passed from one country tavern to another, eating and painting their way - feeding a week upon the landlord, another week upon the landlady, and two or three days apiece upon the children, as the walls of those hospitable edifices too frequently testify even to the present day."

This was so good we had to use it in our catalogue for the William Matthew Prior exhibition. But as someone who has spent a good part of his life studying and exhibiting this artwork, I can only be grateful that this is one majority opinion that has been dramatically overturned in our time.

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. 

Noseprints

Here's another one of those folk artists whose work is so recognizable that there is no debate over attribution when an unsigned piece shows up on the market. Zedekiah Belknap is well known in folk art circles but not so much among the general art-viewing public. He worked mainly in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont between 1807 and the late 1840s as an itinerant portrait painter.

Belknap may not have originally intend to paint portraits for a living. In his youth, he actually entered divinity school at Dartmouth College in the hopes of becoming a minister. He graduated in 1807, and did preach for a few years, although he was never ordained. He began to paint portraits the same year he graduated from Dartmouth.

He didn't have much luck in his married life. Belknap married Sophia Sherman in Waterville, Maine in 1812, but she terminated the marriage shortly after. It seems that Belknap's relatives frightened her. Many of them were afflicted with a hereditary hip disease that left them limping.

Over the course of his forty-one year painting career, Belknap is known to have painted at least 170 portraits. They all have one thing in common, at least to my eye. Yes, it's the noses. All of Belknap's sitters, male and female, young and old, have the same bulbous nose outlined in a thick, reddish line of paint. The Fenimore Art Museum's "Two Children with a basket of Fruit," painted about 1830, is a great example of his work. I particularly like how the rounded forms of the fruit in the basket echo the two very prominent noses in this portrait. Those noses are better than any signature.

Belknap's bad luck continued throughout his lifetime. In 1857 he entered a Poor Farm near Weathersfield, Vermont and died there the following year. His delightful paintings form a legacy that belies the difficulties he endured in his 76-year life. It's both a pleasure and a relief that we never have to argue over whether any of them are really his.

The Enigmatic Foursome

Group portraits are usually pretty straightforward. You know how the father is, along with the mother and the children. If they do not depict obvious family members, as in my previous post about the strange group of ironers, these works can be very puzzling. This is one of our oddest examples of this phenomenon.

The "Enigmatic Foursome" came out of the barn of Mr. and Mrs. William J. Gunn in the late 1950s, found there by Mary Allis and sold to Stephen C. Clark for the Fenimore Art Museum. It has never been considered one of our masterpieces, but it is interesting enough that we have included it regularly in our exhibitions and catalogues.

But what an odd assortment of individuals. Who are they and why would they have a picture taken together? The inclusion of the Black man, ostensibly on an equal standing as the others, is highly unusual for portraiture of the early 19th century (ca. 1835-50 seems a good guess for this painting). That aside, no two members of this group look related, and the laughing red-haired man in front seems particularly out of place.

Our former director, Lou Jones, always had a ready answer for conundrums like this. And his "answer" was usually delivered tongue-in-cheek. When he wrote about this painting in 1960 -- the title "Enigmatic Foursome" is his -- he thought that this was a traveling theatrical troupe of the type that performed in small town taverns and country fairs across rural America in the early decades of the 19th century.

It's not a bad guess. Look at the cast of characters: The Straight Man, at the top; the Ingenue, at the left; the Clown, at the bottom; and the Black character who would have danced and performed between sets. If Jones was right, this is really a very rare piece, documenting a form of early American entertainment in a manner that we just don't see in surviving examples. Even if this portrait depicts something other than a theatrical troupe, it is a remarkable survival of a group of people who by conventional standards have no right to occupy the same canvas. That is the enigma that this picture presents to this day.

Ugliest. Baby. Ever.

I stumbled across this painting just today while attending a meeting in collections storage. It's a piece I know well from the 1980s, but haven't seen in a while. It was thrilling to see it again for a couple of reasons. One, it IS the ugliest folk art baby I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot. Second, and more important, it is one of the great study pieces in the field.

Looking at the painting, one would feel pretty confident that it was cut down from a larger painting. It seems so spontaneous and open-form for a 19th-century folk portrait. But studying more closely reveals two insights that work against such a conclusion. The arms are positioned in a way that would make for a very awkward pose on the part of the mother if she were once included. And if you look closely at the edges of the paint surface you can see the original canvas pattern (visible in the paint) scallops along the left side. This indicates that this was the original tacking edge, which would have pulled the canvas where the nails were placed at intervals.

But looking at the exposed canvas along the unpainted edges reveals more strangeness. The weave of this canvas is much finer than the pattern in the painted surface. Was the original canvas simply mounted on a new one? There is no evidence of a second layer of canvas anywhere.

So what happened? Well, this painting is a rare survival of a canvas transfer done many years ago by an known restorer (probably not a professional conservator). The paint surface was literally peeled off the original canvas (keeping the canvas pattern as a "fossil") and laid onto a new one to stabilize the painting. And as far as we know, it is an original composition showcasing the obvious pride in one's newborn, however misplaced that pride might be.

I've never considered exhibiting this portrait. It's a aesthetic horror. Don't even try to convince me otherwise. But I have never considered getting rid of it either. It's the only example of this kind of physical evidence that I know of, and is a great piece to sue for getting my graduate students to look closely at a painting. I also like having this picture around when I'm in need of a good laugh.

Deciphering Inscriptions

Here's a great lesson in what not to believe when looking at the reverse of a painting and trying to decipher an inscription. We have this portrait of Cynthia Pierce by a folk artist named Noah Alden in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. The inscription on the back looks very clear:  "Miss Cintha J. Pierce 1793/Pinxt June 1800/by Noah Alden."

But there are problems that might not be obvious to the novice. Is 1793 a birthdate? If so, Miss Pierce was painted at the age of seven, which she clearly is not in this picture ("Pinxt" is a Latinized way of saying "painted").  It should also bother you that "Cintha" is so clumsily spelled.

Fortunately we have the mate to this portrait, Cynthia's husband Silas. On the reverse of his portrait ithere is another inscription, but before reading it you should note the look of the canvas. It is much more patinated than hers. This is what an original canvas back looks like. The inscription looks period too, with the appropriate flourishes of the brush. Here is what his reads: "Silas Pierce/born June 26rh 1772/Painted June 1830/by/Noah Alden." So the 1772 and 1793 dates are their birthdates, and the paintings were done in 1830, not 1800.

This is what probably happened. Mrs. Pierce (not "Miss" as the inscription says) was relined at some point. In this process, a restorer will trim the egdes of the canvas and use non-acidic adhesives and heat to attach the old canvas to a new one. This is often done to stabilize a painting that is torn or flaking. In the process, however, you lose the original reverse. In this case, I think the restorer or owner tried to replicate the original inscription on the new canvas. And made several mistakes in the process.

There's one more little tidbit on the back of Silas' portrait that is worth noting. Way down in the lower right hand corner, the artist has included the price: $13.00. That's a detail worth preserving.

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.

Joshua Johnson

Quite a few of the blog posts I have written in the past year and a half have dealt with folk portraiture. We've seen folk portrait painters from the Colonial era, the heyday of the portrait in the early and mid-19th century, and from the photographic era after 1840-50. We've seen famous portraitists as well as anonymous ones. In fact, there has been such a range and variety of portrait painters in these pages that it would be difficult to find a common denominator other than the lack of artistic training.

Difficult, but not impossible. You see, all of the folk portraitists that have appeared here so far have one thing in common: have were white.

There were probably scores of African American portrait painters in the 19th century; some slaves were specifically taught to paint. The problem is that so few are documented or known by name. There is one notable exception.

Joshua Johnson spent 30 years painting portraits in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1795 to about 1825. Thirty years in the same place, plying the same trade among the same community. And yet so little is known about him, other than the paintings which are ascribed to his hand. We do know that Johnson was a free man, which was not unusual for a city where the freed Blacks outnumbered slaves by more than two to one. A 1782 document cites a Joshua Johnson who was a blacksmith, aged 20, who was finishing up an apprenticeship and soon to be freed. It is not certain whether this is the same Joshua Johnson as the portrait painter. City directories list Johnson as a painter beginning in 1796, and trace his movements around the Baltimore area over the next several decades.

Other than that, very little is known about his life. But the paintings speak volumes.

The nineteen works known to have been painted by Johnson display a keen sense of design and color, and a subtle delicacy that is rarely equalled in Anerican art. The subjects, overwhelming white, are all rendered with great sensitivity despite the obvious challenges in the naturalism of the figures. This is a common problem in folk art but in the best works can be turned to advantage by emphasizing pattern rather than three-dimensional form and perspective.

It's a pity that we don't know more about Johnson, and that there is no known self-portrait of the artist. He remains a figure who devoted his working life to preserving the appearance of people in his city, and yet no one knows what he looked like.

I first encountered Johnson's work in 1992 at the Maryland Historical Society in an exhibit of their collection as interpreted by an African American artist, Fred Wilson, and entitled "Mining the Museum." It was provacative in many ways; Wilson applied his own labels to the pieces, inlcuding the slave shackles that bore the ironic identifying heading "Maryland Metalwork, 1750-1800."

But the Johnson portrait stands out as a distinct memory. As you walked up to the painting, your movement triggered an audiotape which said, simply and plaintively, "who will paint my portrait?"


From top:

Westwood Children, ca. 1807, National Gallery of Art

Grace Allison McCurdy and Her Daughters, ca. 1806, Corcoran Gallery of Art

Edward and Sarah Rutter, ca. 1805, Metropolitan Museum of Art

John Jacob Anderson and His Sons, ca. 1812-15, Brooklyn Museum

The Glorious Twilight of Folk Portraiture

I’ve always thought it ironic that just as folk portraiture was dying out, rapidly replaced by the new contraption called the daguerreotype, it became more dynamic. It almost seems as if folk painters knew that their days were numbered and that the cheaper price and more accurate images of the photograph would soon be the method of choice for capturing a likeness. At any rate, the years after the introduction of the daguerreotype to America in 1839 were marked by some of the best folk portraits ever, and few were better than the little-known Samuel Miller.

Miller painted in and around Boston in the late 1840s and early 1850s, more than a decade after the photograph had been introduced. Looking at his paintings, it really is no wonder that, for a time, some people still preferred the old-fashioned custom of commissioning a painted portrait. His likenesses, especially of children, are colorful and boldly patterned. They exude the forthright charm that we have come to associate with folk art.

He also debunks some of the myths. It would be easy to picture Miller traveling the highways and byways of New England,plying his trade in small towns and villages and moving on when business dried up. The facts are that he was born in Boston in about 1806 and died in Charlestown in 1853, having lived in the same community his whole life.

We are fortunate to have five Millers in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. The best of these is our classic Picking Flowers seen at the top of this post. This work shows a young girl in a striking red dress in a well-tended flower garden, standing before a landscape that resembles the south shore of Massachusetts. There is even a small cape style house situated in a snug little inlet at the left. A yellow bird is perched on a tree branch at the upper right, and a cat toys with one of the picked flowers at the lower left. The second illustration here is also from our collection, and shows another girl in an interior setting, teasing her cat with a tassel.

One of the best Millers is the portrait of Emily Moulton at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, seen above. Emily’s portrait includes patterned stockings and a lovely vase of flowers on the windowsill at the right. This portrait bears the inscription on the reverse, "Painted in 1852 by Mr. Miller who lived on the south corner of Pearl and Bartlett Streets, Charlestown, Mass., USA.”

Whoever Miller was, he no doubt loved ornamentation; bright, beautiful colors and shapes abound in these works. He must have felt that the youngsters in these pictures were literally the flower of youth, with all the beauty and promise of a bright spring morning. I suspect that he dreaded the rising popularity of the daguerreotype, and not just for economic reasons. The small, drab images it produced do not do justice to subjects such as these. 

But America in 1850 was a practical culture that prized innovation, and photographs could capture many things that paintings could not. But the loss of the aesthetics of form and pattern and color was profound, at least from our perspective today. It would not reappear until the early Modernists of the 1920s would attempt to reassert it in their paintings. These trained artists, it should be noted, revered the lost folk artists of the mid-19th century.


I guess it IS better to burn out than to fade away....

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.

The Brilliant Simplicity of A. Ellis

These two portraits of an unknown man and woman in the Fenimore Art Museum collection, signed by A. Ellis, are among my favorites folk art paintings of all time. We know so little about the artist; no biographical  data at all, in fact. About fifteen likenesses are ascribed to him (or her), and all come from the Readfield-Waterville area of central Maine. Not exactly on the way to anywhere.

The data we have, of course, is the paintings themselves. Look at these two. Ellis obviously had no artistic training in how to reproduce the observed world naturalistically. No shade or shadow, no three-dimensional modeling, no realistic surface textures. Our couple is sharply retooled into flat, decorative patterns. Lou Jones, our former director, used to say that if you wanted to create paintings to teach what folk art was supposed to look like, you would have ended up with paintings like these. It seems apparently that Ellis  may have been experienced in furniture or wall decoration, where patterns prevailed.

The decorative quality of the woman’s portrait is particularly intriguing. The curls in her hair, the scallops of her costumes, and especially her noodle arm, all exemplify the rhythm and repetition of form that we see in the best folk art. The details that Ellis added, including the flattened facial features and jewelry as well as the nosegay in the woman’s right hand, all add considerable visual interest to the pair. It’s a pity we don’t know who they were. 

Every time I see our pair I am reminded of a great A. Ellis portrait that was found by the legendary New England collector Nina Fletcher Little, whose collection now belongs to Historic New England. I have blogged about Nina in the past; she was amazing. Almost everything she acquired had a history, and her Ellis was no exception. It is a portrait of Diantha Atwood Gordon (below) done in about 1832. Like our portraits, it is done in oil on wood panel and measures about 30 x 25 inches, a standard portrait size. 

Nina Little was first and foremost a historian of New England. Nothing -- no object or painting -- was complete without a history behind it, and she took great pains to acquire that history when she collected something. When she acquired her portrait of Diantha, she did something extraordinary. She tracked down the granddaughter of the sitter (still possible in those early days of collecting!). The great-granddaughter told a story about her grandmother, Diantha’s daughter, who hated her mother so much that she locked her in an outhouse, where she was not discovered until evening.

Casually viewing the portrait of Diantha in a gallery would never bring to mind a mental picture like that. I guess we should count our blessings that Diantha’s portrait survived her daughter’s wrath. 

The Girl Next Door

She may well be the tallest young lady in the Fenimore Art Museum’s folk art collection. This full length portrait of Laura Hall, painted in western Massachusetts in 1808, always turned heads when she was exhibited high up on the wall in our two-story stair hall at the entrance to the museum. People probably never realized what it took to get her up there; a scaffold that was so difficult to assemble it had to be done in the winter when the museum is closed. Laura has spent most of her time in storage these past few years, but is coming out again this fall, albeit at eye level, in our new exhibit, “Picturing Women.” In writing this blog post about her, I found out something that never occurred to me before, something startling and close to home.

Laura grew up in Cheshire, Massachusetts, just north of Pittsfield in the Berkshire Mountains. She was born to a tavern keeper and his wife in 1787 (their portraits by this same artist are in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia). She married an attorney from North Adams in 1810, and they moved west to Syracuse, New York, in 1816. Her husband ran a seminary in Syracuse for more than twenty years.

For many years, the artist of this portrait was known only as J. Brown, so  named for his partial signature on a number of Massachusetts portraits done between 1806 and 1808. It was obvious that he was an itinerant artist who plied his trade in the newly developed settlements from Williamstown to Plymouth. J. Brown painted likenesses that were compelling in their vigorous facial modeling and striking reddish brown coloration. 

And no, he didn’t paint the bodies in the winter and the heads from life; see my post on that common myth. It seems clear from Laura’s portrait that the elegantly embroidered Empire gown and details such as the Windsor chair and jewelry were all part of her life. Even the lovely slippers on her curiously splayed feet. Mr. Brown could paint precise details but had difficulty with anatomical correctness.

But with a name as common as J. Brown, it didn’t seem like there was any hope of positively identifying him. That all changed in 1996 when a portrait came up for sale that was obviously in this same style and with an inscription on the back signed by James Brown. Research by Elizabeth Warren published in the American Folk Art Museum’s Folk Art magazine clarified the lingering questions of attribution and outlined the search for more information on this elusive artist.

The surprise I mentioned earlier? After Laura and her husband left Syracuse in 1833 they settled on a modest farm and raised their seven children. The farm was in Deerfield, New York, a scant five miles from my front door. Come see Laura eye-to-eye this fall in “Picturing Women.”

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.