Paintings — Important Americana
John Wollaston was an English painter of portraits who was active in the British colonies in North America for much of his career. He was one of a handful of painters to introduce the English Rococo style to the American colonies.
His portraits feature rich depictions of fabrics and elegant poses, and his subjects are smiling and oval-eyed; many of his poses seem to be drawn from engravings. Some of his later New York portraits feature a landscape background; most focus on careful depiction of the sitters' apparel, which serves as a conspicuous symbol of their class. His treatment of the subjects' eyes in particular is considered somewhat peculiar, and serves to identify even his unsigned portraits.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
Thomas Sully was a portrait painter in the United States. Born in Great Britain, he lived most of his life in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He painted in the style of Thomas Lawrence. His subjects included national political leaders such as United States presidents: Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson, Revolutionary War hero General Marquis de Lafayette, and many leading musicians and composers. In addition to portraits of wealthy patrons, he painted landscapes and historical pieces such as the 1819 The Passage of the Delaware. His work was adapted for use on United States coinage.
Gilbert Charles Stuart was an American painter from Rhode Island Colony who is widely considered one of America's foremost portraitists. His best-known work is an unfinished portrait of George Washington, begun in 1796, which is sometimes referred to as the Athenaeum Portrait. Stuart retained the portrait and used it to paint scores of copies that were commissioned by patrons in America and abroad. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for more than a century and on various postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Stuart produced portraits of more than 1,000 people, including the first six Presidents. His work can be found today at art museums throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Frick Collection in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, the National Portrait Gallery in London, Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
Gilbert Charles Stuart was an American painter from Rhode Island Colony who is widely considered one of America's foremost portraitists. His best-known work is an unfinished portrait of George Washington, begun in 1796, which is sometimes referred to as the Athenaeum Portrait. Stuart retained the portrait and used it to paint scores of copies that were commissioned by patrons in America and abroad. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for more than a century and on various postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Stuart produced portraits of more than 1,000 people, including the first six Presidents. His work can be found today at art museums throughout the United States and the United Kingdom, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Frick Collection in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, the National Portrait Gallery in London, Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
Antonio Nicolo Gasparo Jacobsen was a Danish-born American maritime artist known as the "Audubon of Steam Vessels".
The public rooms of The Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut, the oldest continuously run tavern in the United States, features the largest privately held collection of Jacobsen's paintings.
John Brewster was a prolific, Deaf itinerant painter who produced many charming portraits of well-off New England families, especially their children. He lived much of the latter half of his life in Buxton, Maine, USA, recording the faces of much of Maine's elite society of his time.
According to the website of the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, "Brewster was not an artist who incidentally was Deaf but rather a Deaf artist, one in a long tradition that owes many of its features and achievements to the fact that Deaf people are, as scholars have noted, visual people."
Sheldon Peck was an American folk artist, conductor on the Underground Railroad, and social activist. Peck's portraiture – with its distinctive style — is a prime example of 19th century American folk art. He also become known for advocating abolitionism , racial equality, temperance, public education, women's rights, and pacifism.
Ammi Phillips was a prolific American itinerant portrait painter active from the mid 1810s to the early 1860s in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. His artwork is identified as folk art, primitive art, provincial art, and itinerant art without consensus among scholars, pointing to the enigmatic nature of his work and life. He is attributed to over eight hundred paintings, although only eleven are signed. While his paintings are formulaic in nature, Phillips paintings were under constant construction, evolving as he added or discarded what he found successful, while taking care to add personal details that spoke to the identity of those who hired him. He is most famous for his portraits of children in red, although children only account for ten percent of his entire body of work. The most well known of this series, Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog, would be sold for one million dollars, a first for folk art. His paintings hung mostly unidentified, spare for some recognition in the collections like those of Edward Duff Balken, for decades until his oeuvre was reconstructed by Barbara Holdridge and Larry Holdridge, collectors and students of American folk art, with the support of the art historian Mary Black. Ammi Phillip's body of work was expanded upon their discovery that the mysterious paintings of a "Kent Limner" and "Border Limner" were indeed his.
William Matthew Prior was an American folk artist known for his portraits, particularly of families and children.
About 1,500 portraits are attributed to Prior. His works are in many museums and institutions around the United States including the Harvard Art Museums, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art.
Susan Catherine Moore Waters was an American painter. Her early career in New York state and Pennsylvania focused on portraits. After moving to Bordentown, New Jersey, she specialized in paintings of animals as well as an occasional still life and other subjects.
The works she produced in Bordentown brought recognition in her lifetime. In 1876, Waters was invited to show some of her paintings at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.
