Friday 11 November 2016

American Folk Art - part 9

Continuing a major series on American Folk Art featuring 21 postings. Folk Art encompasses art produced by artists and ordinary folk with little or no training in the arts, and is traditionally utilitarian and decorative rather than purely aesthetic. The period I’m covering is the C18th and C19th.
See parts 1-8 also for earlier works.

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This is part 9 of a 21-part post on American Folk Art:

Ammi Phillips (1788-1865)


In 1924 a summer fair in Kent, Connecticut, sparked the rediscovery of a major American artist when local residents put several nineteenth-century “ancestor portraits” on display. The strikingly similar canvases depicted graceful women with long slender necks leaning slightly forward within gleaming dark backgrounds and firm men in dark suits, often holding newspapers or books in their hands. The artist, who was then unidentified, was given the appellation “Kent Limner.” It was not until 1965 that Barbara and Larry Holdridge, with the support of Mary C. Black, convincingly demonstrated that the Kent Limner portraits were linked to several other disparate bodies of work and that all, in fact, were painted by a single artist - Ammi Phillips, at different points in his career. For more than fifty years, Phillips—whose biblical name fittingly means “my people” portrayed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of his friends, relatives, and neighbours in New York as far north as Ticonderoga in the Adirondacks, south to Bedford, in Westchester County, and throughout the border areas of Massachusetts, New York, Vermont, and Connecticut.

Phillips was born in Colebrook, Connecticut, in 1788. He was already travelling as an artist by 1809, when he advertised from William Clarke’s tavern in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that he would paint “correct likenesses.” This promise became a leitmotif of Phillips’s work over more than fifty years, from the early romantic portraits of Harriet Leavens and Harriet Campbell—who appear in the guise of fashion plates replete with Chinese silk parasols and reticules - to his last portraits of the 1860s.
From 1829-1838, Phillips (1788-1865) changed his style to what is now known as his Kent style. Phillips' paintings from 1829-1838 are in a new style, infinitely more languid and more highly stylised than any of the likenesses of 1820 to 1828 or the romantic visions of his Border period" 
(Barbara C. and Lawrence Holdridge, Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter 1788-1865, 1968).

This is part 1 of 3-part post on the works of Ammi Phillips:

1811c Portrait of a Gentleman
oil on canvas 60.3 x 75.6 cm

1812-13 Portrait of Ashbel Stoddard
87.6 x 76.2 cm

1812-13 Portrait of Patricia Bolles Stoddard
 72.4 x 61 cm

1814c Girl with Cat
63.5 x 76.2 cm
Amon Carter Museum of Art, Fort Worth, Texas

1814c Henrietta Dorr
oil on canvas
Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ

1815 Mr.Wilbur Sherman
oil on canvas 81.3 x 66 cm
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

1815 Mrs. Wilbur (Sarah 'Sally' Stearns) Sherman (1789-1845) and daughter Sarah (1814-1872)
oil on canvas 91.4 x 76.2 cm
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

1815 Portrait of Harriet Campbell
oil on canvas 123.2 x 63.5 cm
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, PA
1815c Harriet Leavens
oil on canvas 144.8 x 71.1 cm
Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

1815-18c Jerusha Rogers Washburn
oil on canvas 64.1 x 47.6 cm

1815c MaryAnn Gale
oil on canvas

1816 Alsa Slade
oil on canvas 102 x 83.8 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

1816 Joseph Slade
oil on canvas 102 x 84 cm
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

1816c Portrait of Mr. Dilbee of Pine Plains
oil on canvas 97.8 x 80.6 cm

1817c Betsy Beckwith
oil on canvas 77.4 x 62.4 cm
Brooklyn Museum, NY

1817c Colonel Nathan Beckwith
oil on canvas 77.4 x 62,4 cm
Brooklyn Museum, NY

1818c Portrait of a Gentleman with a Snake Cane
oil on canvas 74.9 x 61 cm

1820c Derick Wyncoop and Anna Elting Wyncoop
oil on canvas 74 x 59 cm

1820c General David Robinson
oil on canvas
Bennington Museum, Bennington, VT

1820c Jane Daney Smith
oil on canvas 81.6 x 66 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

1820c Nancy Caldwell Church Robinson
oil on canvas
Bennington Museum, Bennington, VT

1820c Portrait of Sally Morgan Walbridge
oil on canvas 82.5 x 66.7 cm
Private Collection

1820c Reverend Jonas Coe
oil on canvas 122.2 x 97.1 cm
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

1821 Portrait of Dr. John McClennan of Livingston, New York inscribed "John McClellan Aged 48 1821/ Painted by A. Phillips."
oil on canvas 77.5 x 62.2 cm

1821-22 Cornelius Allerton
oil on canvas 83.8 x 69.9 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1821-22 Mrs. Reuben Allerton (Lois Atherton)
oil on canvas 83.8 x 69.9 cm
Art Institute of Chicago, IL

1822 Portrait of Charlotte Newcombe Benedict
oil on canvas 75.6 x 58.7 cm
Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio

1822 Portrait of Dr. Abijah Gilbert Benedict
oil on canvas 75.6 x 58.7 cm
Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio

1824 Hannah Bull Thompson
oil on canvas 76.2 x 61 cm
The Huntingdon Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, CA

1825-30 Portrait of James Ketcham
oil on canvas 81.3 x 67.3 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA

1825-30 Portrait of Lois Belding Ketcham
oil on canvas 81.3 x 67.3 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA

1825c (possibly Ammi Phillips) Portrait of a Man
oil on canvas 58.4 x 71.1 cm.

1825c (possibly Ammi Phillips) Portrait of a Woman
oil on canvas 58.4 x 71.1 cm

1825c Portrait of a Man with Red Curtain
oil on canvas 74.9 x 59.7 cm

1825c Portrait of Cicero Hinds
oil on canvas 73.7 x 58.4 cm

1825c Portrait of Mr. Warburton of Rockboro, Virginia
oil on canvas 73.3 x 60.5 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA

1825c Portrait of Mrs Warburton of Rockboro, Virginia
oil on canvas 75.7 x 60.6 cm
Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA
 

1826c Woman Holding a Hymn Book
oil on canvas

1827 Mary Elizabeth Smith
oil on canvas 65.1 x 52.7 cm
Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, IL

1830c The Strawberry Girl
oil on canvas 66.3 x 56.3 cm

1828 Portrait of a Young Girl
oil on canvas 61 x 50.2 cm

1828-38 Portrait of Ann Miller Tompkins

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