By Robert A. Geake
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to give a brief presentation on some of the artwork associated with Smith’s Castle. In doing research on those paintings, I came upon references that cast much light on those early American limners, or decorative artists who often turned their hand to landscapes and portraits as they travelled throughout the region.
Several of the early “Lumineers” of New England became quite popular for their skill in portraiture. Indeed, in the headlong days of the early republic, such limners were among the thousands of itinerant craftsmen plying their trade. As historian David Jaffe writes,
“Obtaining their artistic training from the pages of design books or from brief encounters with other untrained painters, portraitists traversed the countryside creating images that range from stark black and white silhouettes to colorful, full-length oils…These family portraits found a ready market among “middling” craftsmen, innkeepers, and farmers who sought symbols of middle-class identity and belonging[i]”.
Among the earliest of these artists were young men like Nehemiah Partridge from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. First appearing as a japonner, or decorative artist in Boston around 1712, he was actively painting in New York by 1718 when he was recorded as a limner and had taken on an apprentice named James Smith. Partridge was later introduced to society circles in Albany, New York and was commissioned by several families there. Among his known portraits of the period are of Robert Livingston, the elder, and a full length portrait of Pieter Schuyler, one of the first in the country.
Partridge left Albany in 1720, traveling and painting in Newport, Rhode Island, and Jamestown and Williamsburg, Virginia. During a visit to Newport in December 1722, he painted a pair of “wedding portraits” of Daniel Updike, and Anstis Jenkins Updike For many years his work went unattributed, having signed his paintings with the Latin phrase ”Aetatis Saue Limner” followed by the sitters age and date of composition. The discovery by art historian Mary Black in a patron’s daybook would lead to the discovery of some eighty portraits painted in his hand[ii].
While a copy of the portrait of Anstis Jenkins Updike hangs upon the wall of her husband’s office in the house, (featured as the frontispiece of this article)the fate of the portrait of Daniel remains unknown. While the original portrait of Anstis resides at the Rhode Island Historical Society among its collection of early American portraits, they reputedly have never had the portrait of Daniel.
To whom then, may we attribute the copy we hold at the Castle? A clue can be found in a footnote of Anglican minister Rev. James MacSparran’s diary which states that on the occasion of having to sell the house and property at Cocumscussoc,
“…Wilkins Updike, a lively character of those old days, caused one of his daughters possessing a talent for painting, to be instructed in the art, with a special view of producing very credible copies of those portraits…hanging in the Updike mansion”
The editor insinuates that these copies were the portraits given to the RIHS and that the originals remained with the family.
Art. Historian and critic Robert Hughes attributes the main influence upon portraiture painting in early North America to Scottish artist John Smibert, the first academically trained artist to visit the American colonies. His arrival in Boston in 1729 caused a stir among elites of the city, excited to have “a real artist” among them. But Smibert did not intend to stay. He was journeying with Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. The philosopher it is known, was a mentor to the young Daniel Updike in his studies, perhaps especially, a comfort in the wake of his young wife Sarah and their infant child.
By 1728 he had returned to London, and Berkeley had visions of establishing a university college on the island of Bermuda. Once established, he hoped the school would train legions of Protestant missionaries “to fight what Berkeley feared was the spread of Roman Catholicism and of depraved European values in America.[iii]”
Smibert was to join him in this venture, and he was eager to take the opportunity. His career as a limner in London was failing, the venture offered him a fresh start and new visual challenges to add to his repertoire of decorative skills.
Just as they were planning to sail, Smibert was commissioned by Irish Exchequer John Wainewright to paint a portrait of The Bermuda Group as the work came to be called. The artist brought the canvas and the ten pounds Wainewright had given him as down payment with him to Boston, intending to finish the portrait there.
Smibert’s Dean Berkeley and His Entourage (The Bermuda Group) 1729 Courtesy of the Yale College of Art
Once in the city however, Smibert was flooded with social invitations and commissions from some of Boston’s most prominent families. He put off finishing the portrait until it became apparent that the planned venture in Bermuda was not to be. With his commission funds running low, he hastened to finish the nearly six by eight foot group portrait before heading back to England. In the end the patron decided he no longer desired a cumbersome souvenir of a failed venture, and the painting stayed in Boston, “unsold and unsalable” in the artist’s studio where local artists could drop by and study the Scotsman’s technique.
Smibert, as Hughes has written, displayed “skills at modeling, shading, and the realistic drawing of the human face were obviously far beyond those of earlier colonial artists. It is a recognizably professional picture…It became the prototype of American group portraits for the next half century.[iv]”
Hughes cites the influence of this portrait on American -born artist Robert Feke (1705-1750), especially his 1741 portrait of Isaac Royall and Family, commissioned by Isaac Royall Jr., the young heir of a large plantation in Mendon, Massachusetts; to “paint him with his sister, sister-in-law, wife and child, all exactly rendered in their finery…[v]”
Feke’s career centered on portraits painted in the Boston area as well as Philadelphia, and later, at his own home studio in Newport, Rhode Island.
The same vanity may be said to be the cause of the family portrait we hold in the Castle of John Potter and his family at their tea table with a young enslaved black boy. Potter was a wealthy South Kingstown planter, also notorious for a counterfeiting scheme for which he was convicted in 1742. Painted upon wood circa 1740, the portrait served as an overmantel in the family’s Matunuck home where it remained for many years. The original is now in the collection of the Newport Historical Society.
Portrait of John Potter and Familyc. 1740 Artist Unknown. Courtesy of the Newport Historical Society
The posture of Potter in the painting is nearly equal to that of Bishop Berkeley in Smibert’s painting with the wealthy landowner, surrounded by his wife and daughters dressed in their finery, raising a cup of tea to toast their good fortune. The insertion of a smiling enslaved boy to serve the family table must have been a further mark of vanity, as such servant boys were especially prized among the elite of the Narragansett and Newport families.
Beyond those families who commissioned such portraits in the more affluent cities, were others who had begun to see the value of portraits of loved ones, and there were plenty of itinerant artists to accommodate their wishes.
Among early 19th century itinerant artists were one J. Brown, who travelled the Berkshires painting portraits from 1806-1808, and Ammi Phillips of Kent, Connecticut; who in 1809 embarked on a long and fruitful career among families within the triangle of the Connecticut, New York, and Massachusetts border region.
Such commissions from rural families were not from a sense of vanity, but with the “imminence of death” in early New England, as art historian Lillian B. Miller has noted, portraits of family members became all the more desirable,
“especially portraits of women and children. Among the group of family portraits that Roberts sent to Elizabeth Shrimpton in Boston was one of her dying sister Katherine, who died soon after her portrait was taken. “Wee little thought,” he wrote to Elizabeth, “ye curtaine would be so soon drawn over yet being intended for you hath sent it yt you may see by ye shadow what a sweet likely babe it to live. ...”
A portrait of Elizabeth Eggington (1664: Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, Connecticut), Cotton Mather’s niece, was presumably taken after her death to retain her likeness for her absent seafaring father.
These, and probably other family portraits, testify to the concern of families to retain likenesses of departed members as well as to the realistic recognition— taught at an early age to New England children in such texts as The New England Primer (1727)—that
Youth forward slips, Death soonest nips[vi]”.
That’s not to say that such portraits were painted under the weight of such a tragic familiarity, indeed those early portraits of children are often hopeful and full of objects that reflect the youthfulness, even the mischievous character of their young subjects.
Those of us who work at Smith’s Castle and many who have visited are familiar with the painting of the young girl (or boy) that hangs in the 18thcentury dining room. Docents have long used this portrait to tell visitors the story of these itinerant painters creating half-portraits of boys and girls, men and women; with such details as head and hands to be added later. How such traveling artisans rolled up these canvasses up to be unfurled and finished when a commission was acquired on the road.
Such a story is a falsehood, according to historian Jaffe, citing art historian Holger Cahill’s 1932 work American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750-1900 that such portraits depended wholly upon the artists skill at capturing the features of the subject during whatever accommodated sittings might be afforded. The skill of the artist of the painting at Smith’s Castle is comparable to that of the artist who painted a standing portrait Young Girl with Rattle(1838) attributed to Erastus Salisbury Field. As with the Castle’s painting, the backdrop and supporting objects are perfectly composed, as is the dress and other attire.
Most often in these portraits, the weaknesses of the artist are best expressed in the awkwardness of the body’s posture or arm position, the deficiencies in the composition of the hands, etc. In the portrait at the Castle, one notices immediately the disproportionate size of the neck and head to the body of the subject. In the portrait below, the awkward angle of the left arm, and the uncertain, almost unfinished hand resting on the table detracts from the naturalness of the right arm and hand clutching the rattle.
Girl holding Rattlec. 1838 Lee, Massachusetts. Attributed to Erastus Salisbury Field, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Folk Art Collection
Field is another artist whose career involved various mediums including portraiture. Born in 1805 in Leverett, Massachusetts, he displayed a prodigious talent in sketching portraits by the age of 19, and was admitted as a student at the studio of Samuel F.B. Morse in New York City. Disappointingly, Field had to return to Leverett just three months later when Morse closed his studio. He painted his first portrait-that of his grandmother Elizabeth Billings Ashley, a year later in 1826.
In the 1830’s, Field made a successful living as a limner traveling through western Massachusetts and the Connecticut River valley; enough to support his wife and child back in Leverett. He earned a reputation as a portrait artist for his ability in capturing “a good likeness” in a single sitting[vii]. While one of his most known paintings Portrait of a Young Woman (1830) showcases the artists detailed hand on the sitter’s dress, jewelry, and hair; the face and hands remain stiff and awkward. By the time of his composition of Portrait of Thankful Field (1835) the features on his sister-in-law’s face are much more freely and naturally expressed. In the later, more formal portrait of Elizabeth Cook known as Woman with a Green Book, Field achieves the same freeness of facial expression, using the bonnet and shawl of his sitter to highlight the attractiveness of her features. Her hands also, are rendered attractively, without the stiffness of his earlier compositions.
Field’sWoman with a Green Book, 1838, Courtesy of Wickipedia Commons
Field and his family moved to Greenwich Village in the 1840’s where he had some opportunity to show his art work and also took an interest in the new medium of photography. He moved back to Massachusetts in 1847 to manage his ailing father’s farm and embarked on a new phase of his career, creating romantic landscapes, biblical scenes, and historic paintings. With the death of his wife in 1859, Field and his daughter relocated to Sunderland, where he built a studio and continued painting in these genres.
For many years his best known work, begun after the Civil War was an immense, unfinished canvas entitled the Historical Monument of the American Republic, a “fantastical architectural image of key aspects in American history”. Field had intended to exhibit the work at the 1876 Chicago Exposition, but he was working on the painting as late as 1888. Today, over 300 works, the majority of them portraits, are attributed to his hand. In times of war, such artists were often commissioned to paint scenes depicting the family’s grief at the grave, or for a likeness of the individual after death.
Such mourning scenes began to be produced as early as 1804, and often depicted family members visiting the graves of the deceased. As the form progressed, the typical scene would include the gravestone or crypt, a willow beside whose branches draped over the stone, and perhaps one or two mourners.
Early folk art paintings by itinerant artists began to portray funerals as with other family gatherings. These commissioned or family painted landscapes preserved a moment of family history that were personalized just as the traditional picnics and weddings that were the more common subjects of this genre of American painting. The posthumous portrait of a family member was among the most common commissions for the artist Ammi Philips. In the painter’s journal of 1857, he expresses gratitude at receiving word of one family’s response to his efforts:
“…Lenny’s portrait came tonight. Mother and even Father is perfectly satisfied with it. I was so thankful-it will be a comfort and it will mean more than anything else in the world to us, now.”
A similar work of art hangs in the Updike bedroom of the Castle, its likeness being that of Phebe Bailey Congdon, matriarch of the family who purchased the property in 1813 and owned the house through a succession of nieces and nephews for seventy years.
Phebe Bailey and her first husband, widower Benjamin Congdon, were both members of the Quaker Meeting House in East Greenwich. It is likely there that they met Daniel Updike II who shepherded the arrangement for the transfer of property.
Her life was a often difficult, helping her new husband bear the loss of his seventeen year old son just a few years after their marriage, and then of her husband by suicide in 1815, and her brother-in-law a week later by the same means. Whatever circumstances caused such a tragedy to unfold remains a mystery. Phebe would remarry the last and oldest Congdon brother John two years later, and outlive the mariner by many years.
Portrait of Phebe Bailey Condon (1803-1857) Oil on Canvas, Artist Unknown
The portrait of Phebe as a middle aged woman offers the viewer a pleasant face, the hint of kindness within the lines of age and the glint in her eyes behind the wife rimmed eyeglasses. A slight, wry smile seems poised on her lips even as she is adorned in a formal black dress and shawl.
As Mrs. Congdon died in 1857, it is possible that the portrait was painted from a photograph, but more likely, I believe, is that this portrait is yet another example of a memorial portrait, that is, a likeness developed over time by the artist, to create a sufficient likeness for the patron to “recognize” the subject, as we saw in the correspondence between Philips and his patron.
Much has been made of the markings scene under bright light that show the artist’s attempts to change an earlier likeness, even the circles he or she used for aligning and measuring the facial proportions may be seen; lending much speculation of a “haunted portrait”. Doubtless other portraits composed in this way reveal similar faults that have been painted over before the final brushstroke.
The artist, who remains unknown was clearly by the time of its composition, an accomplished portraitist. The patron, also unknown was satisfied to the extent that a brass name plaque was placed on the frame of the portrait for posterity.
Other artists like Chester Harding and Rufus Porter also sought to and succeeded in refining their skills in portraiture over long careers. Women also, especially those who were gifted in the “schoolgirl arts” adapted their skills to include portraiture.
Mary Way was an early pioneer among women itinerant painters. The prolific Ruth Pinney from a well-to-do family of Simsbury, Connecticut became known for her genre scenes, mourning pictures, and illustrations from literary sources-all common subjects in schools and academies, though as she “learned her palette in the 18thcentury”; she relied more upon her own extensive research and her familiarity with English prints[i].
Memorial Portrait c. 1815 Connecticut. Watercolor and Ink on woven paper. Artist Unknown
These itinerant portraitists captured a variety of people from many walks of life. While most relied upon wealthy families for commissions, their lives as itinerant artists also intersected with those of fellow travelers, tavern keepers, peddlers, entertainers, and a host of fellow artisans. These adorned the walls of taverns, stables, and homes for generations. What they afford us is a unique glimpse into the personal dwellings, fashions, and lifestyles of colonial America. A tangible glimpse into the past, and how those who lived in that era wished to be captured for posterity.