Ammi Phillips
Ammi Phillips (April 24, 1788 – July 11, 1865) was a prolific American itinerant portrait painter active from the mid 1810s to the early 1860s in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York.
Laura Brockway died February 2, 1830, at the age of 38, and Phillips remarried Jane Ann Caulkins, twenty years his junior, five months later.
Rueben Moulthrop, Nathaniel Wales, Uriah Brown, and Samuel Broadbent are all artists traced by documents to the area, and stylistic elements of their work can be seen in Phillips's early paintings.
Phillips was recorded in the diary of Dr. Samuel Barstow of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, dated October 6, 1811, mentioning small portraits he had commissioned of himself and his wife.
[9] Phillips's work satisfied the local standard, and within two years he was receiving regular portrait commissions from community leaders in this area of western Massachusetts.
[14] Gideon Smith was an innkeeper, and displayed his portrait in his tavern, implying that instead of a struggling painter trying to make ends meet, Phillips may have been quite business savvy.
[15] Though he was able to successfully market his skills from a young age, it's likely that the relatively sparse demand for painted portraits, a luxury good, was the main factor necessitating an itinerant career that saw the artist move regularly, family perhaps in tow, between western Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Hudson River Valley.
"[16] Such comments from a well established academic painter such as Vanderlyn positions Phillips not as a wandering peddler of art, but instead as an artist with social and economic importance.
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.
His extensive, continuously evolving body of artwork over a period of five decades provided posterity with a vast archive of early American self-fashioning.
[10] Phillip's most famous work is Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog, which is in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum in New York.
[20] The painting is one of a group of four portraits of children in vibrant red with a dog on the floor that Phillips produced while living in Dutchess County, New York, in the mid-1830s.
"[24] Phillips's modern rediscovery began in 1924, when a group of portraits of women, shown leaning forward in three-quarter view and wearing dark dresses, were displayed in an antique show in Kent, Connecticut.
Attributed at the time to an unknown "Border Limner", these works, dating from the period 1812–1819, were characterized by soft pastel hues and limited drawing skills, as seen in the portraits of Mrs. Russell Dorr and Baby, now in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection, Williamsburg, Virginia, and of Harriet Leavens, now in the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University.
The art historian Mary Black said Phillips's early and late styles reveal the untrained artist's inventiveness in dealing with the difficulty of representing the figure: "In his Border period he made his limitations work for him and the lumpy coats, gangling limbs, huge hands, wooden arms—even the tables tilted at crazy angles—were all part of well-composed and beautiful portraits.
