Paintings Worth Looking At

Why do the paintings I study keep showing up on TV? This is the third time!  ( Mr. Miner and son , Mrs. Miner and daughter )

Folk art is fraught with loss. One of the best-known artists, Joseph Whiting Stock, recorded 900 paintings in his lifetime, but only 100 still survive . It is quite possible that this statistic applies to every folk artist we know, prompting the grim realization that only a slim fraction of these major and minor masterpieces are still intact at all. The same may be true for folk artists themselves. For every single one we have identified, there might be another whose name we’ll never know. And even among the artists who have survived — the lucky ones by name, the unlucky ones as a “limner” — a large number of them have slipped through the cracks. I’d like to help bring them back.  Our first is James S. Hathaway.  I first saw these while scrolling an endless search of Frick Digital Collections, using the magnificently unsophisticated approach of looking at a lot of pictures and hoping something will stick. This one made me stop and stare. It’s James S. Hathaway’s striking repre...

In which Hamey Junior is slightly unhelpful. Well done, Balduinus Hamey M.D. Socio et Benefactore Collegii Medicorum Londinensis. But a shorter title might have sufficed. - - - As we know well, in past centuries, it was common practice for erudite and scholarly British individuals to write in dead languages. They intended to demonstrate their sophistication and mastery of Greco-Roman culture, not just to confound modern researchers, despite how it may seem. Baldwin Hamey Junior , that great fan of Aristophanes and Virgil, is the usual culprit, especially when grappling with his hefty tome “Bustorum aliquot Reliquae,” an index of sentimental eulogies in immaculate Latin. Which is very ironic, considering my own background in the classics, but I think Hamey’s got me beat.

So you’ve been trying to do some historical research, but you’re vexed by the old-time habit of English people not writing in English? You’ve come to the right place. Highbrow scholars used to conduct their correspondence in the languages of the ancients, using so many extra words that it’d put Charles Dickens to shame, except Dickens very sensibly wrote in his native tongue, which gives him a real advantage here. 1600s London literati — like the usual suspect, Baldwin Hamey — didn’t do us that favor. The method I've used and demonstrated in this guide, to extract handwritten Latin text and process it into English, relies on an AI-powered version of OCR technology (optical character recognition). Here's how.

In which the portrait of the father is recycled for the son. - - - These two pictures are oddly similar. As usual, that’s no coincidence.  Last time on the Hamey Channel, we discussed a big-name painter, Cornelius Johnson. Today, we’ll focus on a small name: Matthew Snelling, a little-known miniaturist.  Snelling is remembered for his portrait of Hamey and not much else. (The record of the picture cites the artist as “Matthew (?) Snelling,” granting him even less dignity.) “Baldvinus Hamey M.D.”, shown on the left, captures the good doctor at age 74, pictured with those timeless hallmarks of the medical profession: a dashing cap, several gigantic books, and the marble busts of his favorite ancient authors, which he strokes lovingly like a household pet. 

  An unexpected postscript… - - - It seems like the folk art paintings I research tend to recur again and again with alarming frequency. I'll write to a friend about an artwork I've come across, and hear "I was at that auction" or "I own that painting" or "I saw that portrait last week”! This happens so often that you'd think there's only a few dozen folk art paintings in the whole world. Except for the ones I'm trying to find , like Oliver Ellis Adams, which I expect will turn up 100 years from now in Antarctica. After posting my article about another mysterious Peckham child in blue — “Girl and Cat" — I shared it with American folk art expert and dealer David Schorsch , who's wisely advised me before on my Peckham research. And, to my astonishment, he replied as follows:

From a typo to a temporary loss of identity. A large part of my folk art research method involves scrolling through thousands of records of American School sales, looking at countless pictures to match patterns and spot similarities. There’s a method to the madness, even though most of the time, it is just madness. But when something leaps out, it makes it all worthwhile. One example of the illogical soundness of the brute-force search is Frances and Humphrey Cousens — Peckham’s last two paintings, as listed in Deborah Chotner's Hobby Horse catalog (p. 43), aka the Peckham bible. 

By now, I come across Peckham paintings with statistically unusual frequency, but spotting one in the background of a TV show is a bit much. (painting: Hobby Horse , National Gallery of Art)

In which a cat is very hard to find, because art imitates life. It may not come as a surprise that my recent interest in the works of folk portraitist Deacon Robert Peckham has led me to compile a full catalog of known and unknown Peckhams. After all, when one discovers a new favorite artist, it’s a natural instinct to gather together all of their works, arrange them in proper detailed order, and then go find some more. Fortunately, the job’s much easier when the artist is consistent. So far, during the Peckham-scavenging process, I’ve spotted about a half-dozen of them. They’re usually not too difficult to track down. However (at risk of sounding like the Wicked Witch of the West) this little girl and her little cat escaped me for months. 

Check out my art history research posts so far:  Baldwin, Theodore, and Charles (Various Artists) How To Process Handwritten Latin with AI OCR (Odds And Ends) A Tale Of Two Hameys: Part 2 (Matthew Snelling) The Elusive Kitten: Follow-Up (Deacon Robert Peckham) Meet The Gages (Deacon Robert Peckham) The Elusive Kitten: How To Spot A Peckham (Deacon Robert Peckham) A Tale Of Two Hameys: Part 1 (Cornelius Johnson) The Sketchbook Collection (Sir George Scharf) The Pastel Pair (Theodoor Bohres) The Haunted Nephew (Deacon Robert Peckham) The Artist Who Never Was (Armando Montaner Valdueza) The Man in the Void (Jacob Delff the Younger) In an ironic twist of fate, this random post (originally a complaint about Google's poorly functioning email subscribe function) is the only page that Google has  successfully indexed yet.