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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF BARBARA AND LARRY HOLDRIDGE COLLECTOR'S NOTE In the beginning, there was only George. Engaged and just recently returned from an eye-opening trip to Williamsburg, Virginia, Larry and I were so smitten with American folk art that we found ourselves wanting more examples. It was 1958, still prime for finding masterpieces in both the antique and trash & treasure shops, among the bric-a-brac. And find them we did. Our very first acquisition was George C. Sunderland - young, handsome, debonair - and signed, dated and identified. What could be better, except that we could find no reference to the artist, Ammi Phillips, in any book. Thus began our long, joyous hunt, eager as beagles, for this nineteenth-century master, all over New York State and New England, ending in the correct attribution of all those paintings hanging in museums labeled "Kent Limner," "Border Limner," "Artist Unknown," and so on - all Ammis. We found and bought more paintings by him, too. And from a Phillips descendant, a woman whose grandmother had actually sat for him in 1848, we learned how to pronounce his name: "Amm-eye," Biblical for "my people," appropriately enough. At times we could almost imagine that Ammi was leading us from one serendipitous discovery to another; one portrait to another; one cemetery to another. We were - almost literally - digging up the bodies. And then there were the other finds: notably, a landscape painter catering to the inns of New York and New England, whose work was instantly recognizable by the fantasy he created in each painting - ivy-covered towers, red-roofed castles, mysterious islands, moody roads, the always placid Hudson River - a river that was a special passion of Larry's since he and his ancestors had grown up within its reach - dotted with lively little boats, just a quick brush stroke for the sail. Here was a nineteenth-century American artist marketing mystery and romance to travelers long before guidebooks and travel agencies; brightening the dark hallways and rooms of inns; imbuing the American landscape with his own endearing vision of natural beauty and manmade embellishments. We snapped up all the paintings by this unknown artist that we happened upon, and loved them for their imaginative charm. The portraits, the landscapes, the antique furnishings, the shops, the warm friends we made and eccentric people we met gave us years and years of pleasure. So now, heigh-ho for those days, when great American art and antiques could so readily be found and collected, for those halcyon years, when nearly every country road led to treasure. -- Barbara Holdridge In Loving Memory of Larry Holdridge

AMMI PHILLIPS (1788-1865)*

Portrait of George C. Sunderland (1818-1905)

細節

AMMI PHILLIPS (1788-1865)*
Portrait of George C. Sunderland (1818-1905)
Signed, dated and inscribed on verso, George C. Sunderland Painted When at the Age of 21 years By Mr, Ammi, Phillips, In the fall 1840 (now relined)
oil on canvas
331/8 x 28in.

來源

Lincoln V. Mitchell, Silvermine, Connecticut, 1958
Barbara and Larry Holdridge, Owings Mills, Maryland

出版

Barbara and Larry Holdridge, "Ammi Phillips," Art in America (Summer 1960), pp. 98 - 103, p. 98.
____________, "Ammi Phillips, Limner Extraordinary," Antiques (December 1961), pp. 558 - 563, fig. 1.
____________, "Ammi Phillips, 1788-1865," Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin (October 1965), #142.
____________, Ammi Phillips, Portrait Painter, 1788-1865, (New York, 1969), catalogue #212, pp. 37 and 51.
Hollander and Fertig, et al. Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of American Portraiture (New York, 1994), frontispiece, pp. 56, 74 and pl. XLVIII.

展覽

New York City, Museum of American Folk Art; Albany, New York, Albany Institute of History and Art, "Ammi Phillips, Portrait Painter, 1788-1865," 14 October - 1 December 1968; 9 December 1968 - 7 January 1969.
New York City, Museum of American Folk Art; San Diego, San Diego Museum of Art; and Chicago, Terra Museum of American Art, "Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of American Portraiture," 5 February - 17 April; 9 July - 4 September; and 8 October - 31 December 1994.

注意事項

Christie's assume no responsibility for the authenticity of authorship

拍品專文

One of the most enduring mysteries of the 20th century in American Folk Art was solved by the hunt for and discovery of the true identity of the artist Ammi Phillips (1788-1865). Now regarded as one of the pre-eminent untrained limners of his era and one of the most important American folk painters, Phillips' name was only finally linked broadly with the full range of his work with the landmark exhibition Ammi Phillips, Portrait Painter, 1788-1865, researched and co-written by Barbara and Larry Holdridge in 1968.

The Holdridge's purchase in 1958 of the painting illustrated here initiated one of the most exhaustive in-depth analyses of vital, tax, probate and family records throughout the New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts area, whose success was triggered by the inscription on the back of the canvas of George C. Sunderland. The importance of this painting in breaking the code of an otherwise anonymous limner is the "rosetta stone" for what has become in the present time a body of work numbering almost 1000 portraits by this prolific master.

George C. Sunderland was the son of Joseph Sunderland (1775-1843). The younger Sunderland ran a machinist and millwright business in Somers, New York, and advertised the abilities of his company in the Purdys Station Trumpet in November 1883 with, "Hydraulics a Specialty, with 45 years of experience." George was married to Abigail (1827-1908) and they had a son, George, born in 1857. George and Abigail Sunderland are buried in Bedford, New York.

Phillips' original inscription on the reverse of the canvas, now relined, is illustrated in Hollander and Fertig, et al., Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of American Portraiture (New York, 1994), frontispiece.