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folk art

The Heartbreakingly Lovely Art of Ammi Phillips

Ammi Phillips, a masterful folk artist, was forgotten for decades until his work came to light in a Kent, Conn., antique show in 1924.

Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog

Today, Ammi Phillips’ most famous painting, Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog, highlights the American Folk Art Museum collection.

A New York Times art critic called it ‘one of the most beautiful paintings made by any American artist ever.’ He also called it ‘heartbreakingly lovely.’ Many people have reproduced it, the U.S. postal service featured it on a stamp and a novelist wrote a book about it.

Ammi Phillips

Ammi (pronounced AM-eye) Phillips was born on April 24, 1788 in Colebrook, Conn. As a young man in 1809 he advertised in the Berkshire Record his ability to paint ‘correct likenesses’ with ‘perfect shadows and elegantly dressed in the prevailing fashions of the day.’

Unlike contemporaries like John Singleton Copley of Boston, Phillips worked on the sparsely populated frontier. He roamed the countryside with his family to find customers. Apparently, he found it a romantic and satisfying way to live.

People then viewed portraits as status symbols, and Phillips soon earned commissions from influential people in Berkshire County, Mass. He painted for the next 50 years. That meant moving to western Massachusetts, Connecticut and the Hudson River Valley in search of new customers.

He painted Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog in Dutchess County, N.Y., in 1830.

And he probably influenced a younger itinerant painter in the region, Erastus Salisbury Field.

The Kent Limner

Ammi Phillips died on July 11, 1865, in Curtisville (now Interlaken), Mass., near Stockbridge. For the next 60 years people forgot about him. Then came the antique show in 1924. It displayed a group of 1830s-era portraits of women in dark dresses. The unknown painter of the strongly colored works got the nickname ‘The Kent Limner.’

Ammi Phillips, ‘Portrait of a Lady in an Elaborate Lace Bonnet’

Finding Ammi

About 15 years later, another group of folk portraits came to light near the border of New York and Connecticut. These were painted earlier, with pastel coloring and tentative rendering. The unknown artist of those works was called the “Border Limner.”

Ammi Phillips, ‘Mrs. Wilbur Sherman and Daughter Sarah’

Two folk art collectors, Barbara and Larry Holdridge, bought one of the few paintings Ammi Phillips signed, “George Sunderland,” in 1958. They believed the Kent Limner and the Border Limner had painted it.

For decades they searched for his work, pored over Census records and interviewed Phillips’ still-living relatives and subjects. In 1965, the Holdridges organized an exhibit of 219 Ammi Phillips’ paintings. Three years later, art historians established that Ammi Phillips had painted both groups.

By 1976, art historians identified more than 400 paintings as his work.

Blond Boy with Primer, Peach, and Dog

In 1985, an anonymous donor paid more than $1 million for Girl in Red Dress With Cat and Dog. The secret benefactor then gave it to the American Folk Art Museum.

Hilton Kramer, the starchy New York Times art critic, called Phillips “amazing” in a 1970 review of an exhibit of Phillips’ work. The portrait of Mrs. Isaac Cox, he wrote, was of “superb quality.”

To the modern eye, the portrait of Mrs. Cox particularly speaks with a clarity, precision, and sympathy that places it considerably nearer to our own standards of artistic probity than anything to be found in the common run of ‘serious’ painting at the time. If this is ‘innocent’ painting, it is innocent only of those flatulent academic pretensions which remained the curse of so much of our art in the 19th century.

Mrs. Isaac Cox by Ammi Phillips

This story about Ammi Phillips was updated in 2022.

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Erastus Salisbury Field Paints … And Paints … And Paints His Masterpiece

Erastus Salisbury Field, a gentle, dreamy itinerant painter. traveled around western Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley in the 1830s painting portraits of country people. Then photography came along and he began to paint fantastical landscapes. Field spent 20 years on one of the oddest paintings of the era, Historical Monument of the American Republic.

Erastus Salisbury Field

He was born May 19, 1805, in Leverett, Mass., then an isolated farming town. He and his twin sister Salome were named after their parents.

Erastus Salisbury Field showed artistic talent at a young age and was sent to the studio of Samuel F. B. Morse to study in New York City. Morse had just finished his grand historical painting, The Old House of Representatives, and he won the commission to paint General Lafayette. Young Field never seemed to forget the old general’s visit to the studio. Perhaps his exposure to Morse’s grand painting and to the Revolutionary War hero sent Erastus Salisbury Field around the bend later in life.

Three months after Field arrived in New York, Morse’s wife died and he closed the studio. Field then returned home to Leverett.

$1.50 for Children

For a decade Erastus Salisbury Field made a good living traveling around western Massachusetts and the Connecticut Valley. He painted hundreds of portraits of people for $4 or $5, $1.50 for children. He had a reputation for capturing “a good likeness” at a single sitting.

The Lady of Squire Williams House

In 1841 he moved to Greenwich Village in New York. He probably studied photography, then putting portrait painters out of business.

Josiah B. Woods, Jr. Courtesy Princeton Museum of Art.

Fantastical Paintings

He then returned to Massachusetts, where he advertised himself as a daguerreotypist. Field also began to paint fantastical landscapes with biblical and historical pictures themes. He worked out of a shed – his studio — in Plumtrees, a village in Sunderland, Mass.

He painted a bizarre portrait of Lincoln with his “generals.” But they included George Washington along with Lincoln’s actual generals: Ambrose Burnside, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and Chester A. Arthur.

From 1865 to 1885 he worked on what he considered his masterpiece: the eccentric 9-foot-by-13-foot oil painting called Historical Monument of the American Republic. The work depicts eight towers connected by railroad bridges and trains at the top. Each building told the story of the history of the United States from the settling of Jamestown to the trial of the Whiskey Ring. They appeared as friezes on the towers, as chiseled inscriptions in the buildings, as statues on pedestals jutting up from the parapets .

Field had a dual vision for the work. First, that the Centennial International Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia would exhibit it. And second, that it would provide a blueprint for eight actual towers connected by railroad bridges at the top. The towers would tell the story of America’s history.

He was no doubt disappointed that his monumental work wasn’t accepted at the Philadelphia Exposition, but he had the consolation that his neighbors held it in admiration and came to view it.

Painting, and Church

At 71, he had a print made of the Historical Monument. He then paid to have an 11-page catalog printed, explaining what it all meant.

“A professed architect, on looking at this picture, might have the impression that a structure built in this form would not stand,” he wrote in the catalog. But, he argued, the towers could be filled up with stones, leaving the center hollow for circular stairs reaching to the top.

Historical Monument of the American Republic, courtesy Springfield Museum of Art.

He lived out his life quietly in rural Massachusetts in the summer, staying with family in Hartford during winters. School children and relatives came to visit him in his studio. He explained his paintings to them despite his deafness. He collected sap and made maple syrup, chopped wood and walked two miles to church on Sunday. In 1900 at the age of 95 he cast his vote for the state election.

Erastus Salisbury Field slipped away on June 28, 1900. His Historical Monument of the American Republic was found rolled up in an attic in 1933.

By then, though, attitudes had begun to change toward American folk art.

Folk art collector Abby Aldrich Rockefeller loaned two of his paintings to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for an exhibition in 1932. Three then went to Brussels in 1958 to be exhibited at the World’s Fair.

Today his work – including the Historical Monument of the American Republic — is now on display in the Springfield Museum of Fine Art.

With thanks to Erastus Salisbury Field 1805-1900 by Mary Black. This story last updated in 2022.

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Joe Lincoln, Champion Decoy Carver

Joe Lincoln, fascinated by the waterfowl on a nearby pond, began carving miniature decoys as a boy. He grew up to be one of the greatest decoy carvers ever.

Joe Lincoln, detail from photo, Courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection

Joe Lincoln

Joseph Whiting Lincoln was born in 1859 in Hingham, Mass., and lived across from the Accord Pond. He probably had a relationship to Abraham Lincoln.

He started carving just for fun. Then as a teenager he sold his first decoy to a sportsman (they were actually used in hunting) and he was off to the races. He chopped the bodies by hand from cedar or pine and then smoothed them with a drawknife. He refused to use power tools because he thought power tools too blunt for decoy carving. The photo was taken in 1926 by longtime Boston Herald photographer Leslie Jones.

The New York Times called Joe Lincoln “a talented Yankee tinkerer and craftsman who could make everything from a camera to a pair of shoes.”

He died in 1938 after spending his life carving decoys from a 10’ by 12’ shed in his yard. Collectors prize his work. In 1986, a wood duck drake by Joe Lincoln sold at auction for $205,000. His work can be seen at the Ward Museum in Salisbury, Md.

Duck decoys

Museum Pieces

The birds portray several attitudes. Some swim, some preen and some have their bills nestled under a wing.

The museum describes a typical Lincoln decoy. It “has a gently raised neck seat that flows into a low rounded chest. Arched backs give way to horizontal tails above flat bottoms.”

Lincoln also typically painted symmetrical lines on his decoys, and he simplified plumage patterns, making a highly stylized image.

He carved a number of different kinds of species, including brants, buffleheads, canvasbacks, goldeneyes, mallards, mergansers, old squaws, pintails, redheads, ruddy ducks, scaups, teals, whistlers, wigeons and wood ducks. He also produced a handful of other species for special orders.

Image of decoys: By schmuck-by-nature – originally posted to Flickr as Decoys, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8943514. This story last updated in 2022.

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