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Lot Essay
One of the most prolific and important itinerant portrait painters of early 19th century America, Ammi Phillips (1788-1865) portayed America in a self-taught manner that is at once distinct and recognizable. One of the numerous portrait painters traveling and working at this time, Phillips is important for the variety and individuality of his painting styles. Phillips' work was formerly attributed to at least five different artists; the identified Phillips, the partially identified painters "Phillips," "A. Phillips," "Ammi Phillips,", and the unidentified Kent Limner and Border Limner. Phillips became known by these different identities on the basis of both signed and partially signed works, as well as the location in which the majority of his original sitters lived where the paintings descended in the same family. Working in the area defined by the borders of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusett, as well as in a few specific communities such as Kent, Connecticut, between approximately 1829 and 1838, the identities by which Phillips' portraits were formerly known fall into recognizable stylistic formats loosely paralleling his travels. His earliest portraits were completed circa 1811, and continued to paint until the end of his life.
Painting in the characteristic pallett and mode of his 1830's portraits, with dark background and costume, softly colored faces, bright strawberries and round-headed cat, the likeness illustrated here is a relatively rare example of the double portrait format by Phillips. While the double portrait illustrated here lacks such standard props as the fancy painted chairs, books and candlestands frequently seen in his portraits, Phillips availed hinself of the unusual compositional opportunity of two sitters on one canvas by having his subjects interact with each other. In this instance, where the older boy gestures toward his younger sister, the pose of the little girl balances and brings the focus of the portrait back to center with her outer hand holding the strawberries directed toward her inner hand reaching toward center for her cat.
In excess of three hundred portraits are now attributed to or are known to be by Ammi Phillips, include Palsapiana Bull Dorr and her daughter, Maria Esther (1814), Sally Sherman and her daughter, Sarah (1815), Mrs. Goodrich and Child(n.d.), and Jacob Wessel and William Henry Ten Broeck (1834), Rachel Anne Ostander and her son, Titus (1838). A single triple portrait of The Three Children of Henry Joslen Carter was executed circa 1860 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. For illustrations of these portraits and further information on Phillips, see Holdridge, Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter, 1788-1865 (New York, 1969).
Painting in the characteristic pallett and mode of his 1830's portraits, with dark background and costume, softly colored faces, bright strawberries and round-headed cat, the likeness illustrated here is a relatively rare example of the double portrait format by Phillips. While the double portrait illustrated here lacks such standard props as the fancy painted chairs, books and candlestands frequently seen in his portraits, Phillips availed hinself of the unusual compositional opportunity of two sitters on one canvas by having his subjects interact with each other. In this instance, where the older boy gestures toward his younger sister, the pose of the little girl balances and brings the focus of the portrait back to center with her outer hand holding the strawberries directed toward her inner hand reaching toward center for her cat.
In excess of three hundred portraits are now attributed to or are known to be by Ammi Phillips, include Palsapiana Bull Dorr and her daughter, Maria Esther (1814), Sally Sherman and her daughter, Sarah (1815), Mrs. Goodrich and Child(n.d.), and Jacob Wessel and William Henry Ten Broeck (1834), Rachel Anne Ostander and her son, Titus (1838). A single triple portrait of The Three Children of Henry Joslen Carter was executed circa 1860 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. For illustrations of these portraits and further information on Phillips, see Holdridge, Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter, 1788-1865 (New York, 1969).