It's a Small World

Here's the second in my series of posts relating to finds I made at this year's Winter Antiques Show in New York City. This one was a sweet little piece, and a rare one too. As I discussed in my post from last March regarding a large watercolor and ink map sampler that I bought for the museum, these particular forms of schoolgirl work are much more difficult to find than the more common Biblical scene or print-derived landscape. That's why this small map sampler in the booth of Stephen and Carol Huber caught my eye.

This piece is only about 10" wide, much smaller than our large piece from last year. The workmanship is quite good for the scale, as you can tell from the detail photos. And it's signed, by an Anna Gill, and dated 1804. This is important because, like to many pieces that I have blogged about in these pages, there is a good story behind this piece that we would not know if it wasn't signed.

According to the dealer offering this sampler, Anna Gill lived in Pleasant Valley, New York and was eleven years old when she did this piece. Her mother, Wilhemina Anthony Gill, had a private nurse from childhood, a slave purchased in 1761 and named Dina. During the American Revolution, when the British troops invaded the Hudson Valley and destroyed numerous homes (including nearly all of Kingston, NY), Dina stayed behind after the family fled into the woods, as she was determined to protect the family home. The story goes that when she encountered the British troops she offered them a meal in return for sparing the house. Surprisingly, they agreed, but burned the mill.

Records indicate that when Dina died in 1823 she was a free person. The Gill family had such respect and gratitude for her that they arranged to have her buried in the family plot in Poughkeepsie Rural Cemetery. Anna, the maker of this sampler, died unmarried in 1844 and is buried in the same plot.

These map samplers were meant to demonstrate a schoolgirl's knowledge of world geography. It just seemed fascinating to me that behind this small demonstration of one's awareness of the world there was a family history that stood squarely at the intersection of Africa, Europe, and North America. Some things can't be taught in school.

Crossing the Atlantic at the Winter Antiques Show

I just returned from my annual January visit to New York City and the Winter Antiques Show, and have several interesting discoveries to share. This is a show not to be missed; there are dozens of dealers representing a wide range of interests from fine art to ancient art to tribal art and, of course, American folk art. You may or may not go there to buy, as the prices are consistent with what you might expect from an antiques show on Park Avenue, but the looking is its own reward. You can educate your eye more fully in an hour here than in weeks of seeking out individual shops in the many regions from which these dealers come. And the setting is glamorous, as you can see by the entrance to the show below.

While wandering through the show, I kept an eye out for pieces that had certain similaities with ones in the Fenimore Art Museum collection. Here's a good one.

This life-size carved wooden figure depicted a mariner holding a sextant. It is beautifully carved, probably in a large ship carver's shop. At first glance i would have thought it to be American, but according to the label it is English. The piece is attributed to a carver named Thomas Hall Tweedy, who reportedly carved it for a natical instrument maker's shop (the dealer even gave the name of the shop: John Cail!) in Newcastle on Tyne.

This figure undoubtedly sat outside the shop on the sidewalk, like a cigar store figure. But it reminded me so much of a little figure in our collection I just had to photograph it and share it here. Our figure is even mentioned in the dealer's label for the large piece.

Our little mariner is only about 25 inches tall, but it depicts the mariner holding the sextant in the same manner as the large figure. Our is, of course, much more primitive than the large one. But very appealing for those who have an eye for folk art. Our piece was found in New Bedford, Massachusetts, and is thought to have come from a nautical instrument maker's shop in that important coastal city. The small figures would generally be displayed either on countertops or, as I have seen in one period photo, outdoors on a cantilevered mount above the shop doorway.

However separated by thousands of miles of ocean, these two pieces remind us of the seafaring culture that binds the hemispheres. This notion has gained such credibility in recent years that historians speak less and less of American or European history and instead study Atlantic history. Or, as the Mystic Seaport Museum in Mystic, Connecticut, is fond of saying: the sea connects us all.

The Castles of Montgomery

This is really one of the most spectacular pieces in the Fenimore Art Museum folk art collection. It’s a large painting on canvas, about 41” x 55”, depicting an imaginary scene of two castles on a river. The castles have different banners flying overhead, with the one on the left looking decidedly Moorish, perhaps evoking the medieval tradition of battle scenes between Christian and Moorish knights. The title of the work comes from the prominent inscription along the top: “View of the Castle of Montgomery.”

We don’t know the source of this image (there is a Montgomery Castle in Wales but we have not found a print view of it that would be the source of this painting; besides, you would more likely find Moorish castles in Spain and Portugal), but the manner in which it was painted is the reason for its appeal. The colors are bright, bold, and solid. The castles are flattened against the picture plane in delightful patterns, and the repetition of forms such as the boats on the river, the trees on the horizon, and the birds in the sky creates an almost hypnotic rhythm. The lone fisherman on the shore adds an almost quaint, everyday mood to the piece.

Oral tradition holds that this painting was created as a fireboard, or fireplace enclosure, by the architect of the Wofford House in Woodruff, South Carolina. It was probably painted in the mid-19^th century, around 1830-35. Interestingly, a nearly identical piece exists in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg, Williamsburg, Virginia (shown here at the bottom). That piece was painted for the Moore family home in Fredonia, just seven miles from the Wofford House. That painting bears the exact same inscription as this one, referring to the enigmatic “Castle of Montgomery.”

The existence of two identical fireboards of this size and quality within seven miles of each other provides us with a tantalizing clue to the artist, who was undoubtedly local. We don’t know for sure what Montgomery refers to, but research at Colonial Williamsburg suggests that it might be local too. According to the research, the probable reason for the commission of their work occurred in 1833 when the owner of the Moore home, Dr. Andrew Barry Moore, brought his new bride home for the first time.

Her maiden name? Nancy Montgomery.

Folk or Fake?

This may be one of the most interesting and instructive pieces in the Fenimore Art Museum’s folk art collection. As such, it has a special status in relation to all of the other paintings in the collection.


That’s because it is a fake. A rare fake by a famous forger.

In 1990 Robert Lawrence Trotter was sentenced to 10 months in Federal prison for the forgery and sale of American folk paintings. Trotter was a talented artist in his own right, but was unable to sell his works. So he started forging the works of other historical painters whose works did have a ready market. One FBI agent explained: “He’d go into antiques shops, buy old frames, use square nails and ultraviolet light to cause certain cracks to occur. He wouldn’t copy, but he’d paint in the famous artist’s style. Sometimes he would sign their name, sometimes he wouldn’t.”

When Trotter was sentence to federal prison, he was ordered to give four of his fake paintings to Yale University so that they could be studied for future use in identifying forgeries.

There are 55 known Trotter fakes, only 16 of which have ever been recovered. That’s what makes our example so rare.

Looking at the piece, you can see right away why Trotter was successful, at least for a while. It is beautifully painted in a style consistent with what one might expect for 19th-century New England portraiture.

To my eye, however, there are some red flags. The baby here is too stylized and awkwardly proportioned in relation to the mother. The mother herself bears too much resemblance to the works of known folk artists like Noah North and Milton Hopkins. Overall, the work strikes me as a pastiche of different styles rather than one uniform manner of painting. I'm sure there are other technical ways in which a conservator could determine that this work is not authentic as well, but in the field one has to rely on a practiced eye.

The real clue, for me, is the reverse, which most people don’t inspect when they buy a painting. You can see quite clearly here that although the stretcher is clearly old, the canvas is not. Dead giveaway, in my opinion.

There are 55 known Trotter fakes, only 16 of which have ever been recovered. Ours and the four at Yale are the only ones I know of in public collections. Ours was donated by a private individual who wanted a public record of Trotter's fakes so that others would not be fooled. So like those at Yale, our Trotter is available for study by any qualified individual interested in learning more about the technical process of creating a work of art that isn’t what it appears to be.