The Haunted Nephew (Deacon Robert Peckham)
In which a terrifying little boy goes missing, but winds up immortalized in a classic horror movie.
He also painted these.
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| As we know, the only thing a baby needs more than a hammer is a miniature stagecoach driver costume. |
I will concede, these weren’t easy for Peckham. Oliver Adams and John Adams (c.1822) depict his nephews captured postmortem, to remember them by, as was the custom of the day out of necessity. Peckham did his very best to render them with life and sympathy, considering the circumstances. The works are from relatively early in Peckham’s career, which further contributes to the quality difference. In terms of attribution, these paintings are the legitimate article; they appear in the wonderful Hobby Horse exhibit catalog compiled by former NGA curator Deborah Chotner, with whom I’ve consulted about my Peckham studies.
Oliver and John appear online only in their Pinterest uploads, both posted by Barbara Vajnar, a user interested in folk art and miniature furniture craftsmanship. Well, why not contact Barbara? I thought to myself. She’d be able to share where she found them. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that Barbara tragically passed away in 2022. I'm very grateful for her contributions, and wish I could have connected with her.
For lack of other options, I kept looking. The boy in red is listed in the Catalog of American Portraits as John Adams (a rare name if there ever was one) and the boy in blue is listed as Oliver Ellis Adams. As it turned out, much later, the boy in red’s real name is Oliver Adams (not to be mistaken for Oliver Ellis Adams). Their father is also named Oliver Adams. No doubt it’s clear why someone along the way got confused. Notably, Peckham also painted the “Children of Oliver Adams,” which lists Oliver 1 and Oliver 2 among the deceased children in a memorial wall plaque.
The frequency of child mortality in the olden days is jarring and shocking, especially from our modern perspectives.
After some research, namely a folk art exhibition catalog from 2009, I was eventually able to locate the owners of John Adams, and they graciously sent me a much, much higher quality photograph:
Much better! Less creepy, more cute. As the catalog points out, Peckham’s novice errors in paint-mixing are obvious here — the boy’s red dress shines through beneath the dark surface of the dog’s fur. Fortunately, that’s important and relevant as a tool to help identify an artist. Technical quirks like that, including idiosyncratic flaws, can be telltale signs of a particular individual's methods.
That’s part of why I still needed to find Oliver Ellis Adams. I was (and still am) researching another possible Peckham, which features a noticeable paint deterioration in a child’s blue dress. It reminded me very much of the way Oliver’s blue dress fades to that muddy brown tone. So I was determined to track down a better picture of Oliver to compare.
Except Oliver was missing. There was no image record of him anywhere else on the Internet. He appeared only in a New York Times 1985 article, recording an auction of a folk art collection, as follows: “Robert Peckham's 1820's ''Portrait of Oliver Ellis Adams,'' is a study of his nephew as a jowly-faced child, wielding a small whip and wearing a blue dress and gray top hat (up to $60,000).”
Well, that’s the right description, at least. But what next?
Off I went, to trusty Google Images…
Pet Sematary?
As those Reddit and Stack Exchange posts informed me, young Oliver has an unexpected cameo feature. He’s a prop in the 1989 horror film “Pet Sematary,” an adaptation of a Stephen King novel. The painting has major plot importance as part of a flashback sequence, and serves as visual foreshadowing. In the movie, the small child Gage is very creepily revived after an early death, and wears an outfit very similar to Oliver’s stagecoach driver costume — top hat and all. (The cat in the “Pet Sematary" picture was added for the sake of the story, although it would’ve been a nice poetic touch if the original Oliver had the cat, too, to match his brother’s dog.)
The director Mary Lambert said in an interview: “I always had a fascination with those old New England paintings. It actually was because of the high infant mortality rate. So many children died at an early age, and they wouldn't have any photographs of them, or pictures, so they would dress them… A lot of those pictures are of dead children that have been dressed so their parents can remember them. That's why they're so creepy, those portraits of 2, 3, 3, 5-year-old children dressed in weird little outfits and really stiff. That was my inspiration for how Gage comes back, because that's a form of bringing somebody back from the dead.... I had it painted especially for the movie.”
Perfect. So it was a copy. Fair enough, I reasoned. Whoever painted that copy must’ve seen the original painting somewhere. All I had to do was get in contact with somebody who knew where it actually was.
Easier said than done. I spent a month on convoluted research attempts, including emailing everybody in the props and sets department on the IMDB “Pet Sematary” credit page. Some didn’t reply; those who did reply were courteous, but nobody remembered anything. I finally gave up and went to a different source — the actor who played the child in the movie, Miko Hughes. He wrote back to me: “I wish I had any information for you, but I was a baby during the filming.”
Fair enough!
Miko was very nice, though, and recommended I contact Mary Lambert. I still couldn’t find her contact information, so I decided to take a different angle; I wrote to John Campopiano, the director of “Unearthed & Untold,” a documentary about the making of “Pet Sematary.” John was exceptionally considerate and encouraging, and even gave me Mary’s email address.
I wrote. And then I waited.
In the meantime, I found out what Oliver Ellis actually looks like in full color, from the auction catalog page:
Much cuter than expected. Full color helps! And there’s that telltale paint fading in the blue dress. He looks less ghastly and more cherubic.
What next?
One day, miraculously, I received the answer. Mary Lambert replied to my email and very graciously shared the answer (and agreed to be quoted for this article. Thank you, Mary!) She told me:
“At the time I was directing Pet Sem, I was spending a lot of time with a friend who collected early American furniture and art.
I believe I saw the painting at a Sotheby's auction preview and brought home the catalogue. The painting interested me because of the tradition in colonial times for people to commission death portraits of dead children. The infant mortality rate was very high and many children died young. Obviously there was no photography back then. I became very interested in this art form a long time ago, and it had particular relevance for me as a Director of pet Sematary, which is about the death of a small child and the attempts of his father to immortalize him. I shared this portrait with the costume designer who designed a costume for the revenant Gage to wear in one of his manifestations as he returns from the grave. Then I decided that we should put a portrait of this ilk in one of the flashbacks that Rachel has to her traumatic childhood. And thus give a reason why this image might be something that lives in her imagination.
So the only time I saw the actual portrait was at the auction preview. We used the image in the catalog as an inspiration for a portrait that I commissioned to use, especially in the film. I’m pretty sure that I no longer have the catalog in my possession. I hope some of this helps.”
So… a dead end.
Thematically appropriate, but sad.
Nobody has any idea where the picture went, or who bought it. At least, now I know Oliver Ellis Adams (Pet Sematary edition) was replicated by painting from the image reference in his auction catalog. I do have a copy of the page, and I found out, via the Ebay seller who kindly sent me the scan, that it was sold to a phone buyer for $55,000. Beyond that, there’s no surviving records of the Sotheby’s sale. I’ve inquired as far and wide as I possibly can — the "Maine Antiques Digest" was even kind enough to run an information want-ad for me. But the trail is as cold as the day I began.
Oliver remains lost to the world of research. But at least his image lives on in an iconic and popular movie, memorializing Peckham’s nephew more permanently than the artist could’ve possibly imagined.
AN UNEXPECTED POSTSCRIPT:
The “Pet Sematary” cat has been coincidentally found!
During my research into another painting of a different child by an unrelated artist, I stumbled across this work – a young girl named Jane Tyler, depicted with her cat. This full-length portrait (c. 1845) is attributed to the famed Massachusetts folk artist Joseph Whiting Stock, known for his ability to charmingly capture children in much the same way as Peckham. His clothing is often stylized, but he has a particular knack for realistic faces and piercing, knowledgeable gazes. And odd-looking cats.
Here’s Jane:
Here’s Jane’s cat:
Here’s the Pet Sem cat again:
One and the same!
I wrote to Mary Lambert for confirmation, but she is very busy and I haven’t heard back yet. (EDIT: Confirmed by Mary!) Since this auction was from the Peter Tillou estate collection (the same collector that sold Oliver Ellis Adams back in the 80s), it’s very likely she or an artist for the film came across it in the same catalog, or perhaps a related exhibition, and created the composite painting from the different elements.
Incidentally, every folk artist has a particular manner of depicting cats (some more realistic than others). This one is for sure a Whiting Stock cat. His portrait of Mary Jane Smith has all the same stylistic quirks in her cat, including those uncannily human eyes!
Peckham did attempt to paint cats sometimes, too; another mysterious folk art cat will eventually appear on this blog.
See you next time.
