Seen at Sotheby's

I happened upon this portrait in the show room at Sotheby's earlier this week and had to laugh. As you already know, over the years I've seen many portraits of children from the early and mid-1800s posed with family pets. Most of them are dogs or cats, with the occasional bird. This child, however, appears to have had a favorite lamb. It's hard to imagine mother letting that thing in the house, especially at meal time.

As always, a good week in New York looking at curious and amazing things. There's more on the way. In the meantime, enjoy this unusual piece. It's a pity that it didn't come with any history, but the image often tells enough of a story anyway.

Ferdinand Brader

About a decade ago, when we did the landmark exhibition on the German-American folk artist Fritz Vogt, we realized that there was a remarkably compatible artist who worked in Pennsylvania. his name was Ferdinand Brader, and he produced large and detailed graphite scenes of farm complexes mostly in the 1880s, just before Vogt's prime years of artistic production in the 1890s. I had seen fantastic examples of Brader's work in private collections and always admired them. They tend to be larger and even more detailed than Vogt's -- not necessarily better in a qualitative way, but different enough to distinguish the two men. We could not prove any link between Brader and Vogt, but it is not hard to imagine that one may have existed either in the US or Europe (Brader immigrated from Switzerland). By the way, our findings on Vogt are published and available here.)

Well, Brader will finally be given his due in 2014 at the Canton (Ohio) Museum of Art. An exhibition team lead by curator Kathleen Wieschaus has identified 194 surviving drawings and has uncovered loads of family stories that relate to the works. Their website, Brader Exhibit 2014, details their progress on an ongoing basis. Here is one of my favorite stories from one of the drawings in the exhibit. It reminds me so much of the Vogt project, I had to share it:

Just a few weeks ago, a resident of Stark County, OH, brought in his Brader drawing and told the story of his Swiss great-great-grandfather and the making of Swiss cheese on the family farm. The Brader shows the Cheese House at the center left, where area farmers are bringing their milk and a supply of firewood to cook the milk with rennet (enzymes from a cow's stomach which helps turn the milk into curds). Cool water pumped from a well just behind the Cheese House and funneled through the structure in troughs can be seen in the drawing. This water kept the milk fresh until enough was gathered to make the cheese. The curds would be pressed into wheels with the whey fed to the pigs. The cheese rolls would be placed on boards and carried into the house (the drawing shows one man doing t his) where they would be aged in the basement. Eventually the aged rolls would be taken to market and sold.

As with Vogt, Brader was a keen observer who left us with an extraordinary record of a time long gone. I congratulate Kathleen and her team for piecing this history back together and sharing it with all of us. Please keep an eye on her website for updates on the progress of the Brader exhibit.

And think about this drawing the next time you have some fine Swiss cheese.

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.