No Great Pretension (Zedekiah Belknap)

Collecting requires patience. 

Patience while sifting through endless prints, reproductions, and lackluster landscapes. Patience while keeping an eye on the calendar. And above all, patience on the day of the auction, sitting at the computer as the clock ticks by, waiting for your lot number for what feels like an eternity. 

And even then, there are no guarantees.

Such was the case for this very fine Zedekiah Belknap, Portrait of a Lady Reading a Bible. She’s colorful, appealing, and well-preserved, surviving in exceptional condition for two centuries. 

She was listed with careful diligence as “style of Belknap,” but there was never any doubt in my mind that this lady was the legitimate article. From the translucent lace to the patterned chair, the portrait is compellingly thorough, filled with detail and personality. Her opened book is even identifiable as the book of John in the New Testament. It’s not only a wonderful piece of visual art, but a portrait in every sense of the word: it tells us about her interests, her sense of fashion, her faith — who she really was. 

Her name has not survived, but maybe it didn’t need to. After all, portraits with anonymous sitters are just as lovely as the paintings whose names we know. 

As you would expect for folk art, the presence or absence of a name doesn’t seem to have dictated the success of Belknap’s works at auction. After all, on MutualArt, only 14 out of 64 Belknaps were sold with the sitter’s name in the listing; on Artnet, only 31 out of 105. However, while poring through the listings, I encountered this lovely lady with a very strong resemblance to our “Lady with a Bible.” The similarity is striking. 

However, her condition is not quite as fine, yellowed by varnish, and her outfit is somber and dark, unlike the vibrant pink bow and baby-blue dress. But the likeness between the two ladies is remarkable — above and beyond the notable consistency of Belknap’s style. Perhaps they were sisters? We can only guess. Unfortunately, she has no name, either; she was sold in 2005 and again in 2006, and the provenance is limited, so further information is not likely to turn up. (I did spot her in a 2009 Pinterest post of Joan R. Brownstein’s site, and then in the Internet Archive in higher-quality, but nothing more.) Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to know that there may be a matched family pair out there. I wonder why they are dressed so differently?

Anyway, I kept an eye on that upcoming Belknap auction, patiently waiting for weeks. I wasn’t sure how much competition there might be, or how many collectors are currently interested in Belknap. At last, the day of the auction rolled around, and there it was. Only three things in life are certain: death, taxes, and reminder emails.

The notification said 11 people were watching, which isn’t so bad. The $500 starting point seemed reasonable, though the $800-1200 estimate was a bit steep for me. I decided to set my personal limit at slightly less. After all, other Belknap portraits of adults in recent years have sold for a mere few hundred. She would be a nice addition to the collection, if the auction went in my favor, but I wasn’t dying to have her. 

In hindsight, that’s for the best. 

The auction began… and, I’ll admit, my timing was not ideal. The auction’s pace was, shall we say, on the slower side. I sat in front of the computer, waiting and waiting, afraid to miss it (and searched for even more paintings in the meantime. Results: mixed.) At last, after hours of self-imposed database drudgery, Lot 351 came up. There she was: an outlier among the gallery’s offerings.

I waited several long seconds, and then for several more seconds, which felt even longer. My mouse hovered over the Bid Now button. Somehow, the price was still $500. 

Maybe everyone else did miss this one.

I clicked it. Why not? 

The bids poured in instantly. The price ratcheted up and up. 500, 550, 600, 650, in the blink of an eye, then up to 800, 850, 900, past my limit. Someone else was dying to have this. I sat back from the keyboard. The auction had become a spectator sport.

It reached $1,000. Then it ramped up faster, swiftly hitting $2,000, then 3,000. It began to feel surreal. Up by $200 at a time, rocketing to $4,000, then $5,000! The price went up by $500 at a time — 6,000, 6.5, 7, 7.5. Soon it hit $10,000. This modest portrait by Zedekiah Belknap would sell for ten times its estimate. And then, shockingly, it kept going up! My family was watching, too, and were equally stunned. At $15,000, I finally had the presence of mind to take a screenshot. 

Finally, it looked like it was over. At the astounding price of $15,000, it slowed down at last. Maybe one side had given up. The “Fair Warning” notice went off, signaling the end… 

And the bidding war started right back up! $16,000 on the table for this humble Zedekiah Belknap. We cheered loudly.

The other person counter-bid again at $17k, defeating the bold move of $16k. That was the end. Someone was dropping out. The Fair Warning notice went off, once, twice, three times. Sold! The Belknap closed at $17,000, seventeen times its estimate.

And the next lot opened for bidding at a mere $175. 

It was completely surreal. None of us could believe it. Perhaps it was naive of me to be so surprised by this. After all, the actual collecting side of artistic study is less familiar to me. I’m sure it’s happened before and will happen again. But I was absolutely delighted to see this modest portrait command such a staggering price. I’ve never been so happy to be outbid. 

It was also a reminder of how difficult it can be to acquire a quality piece. But, at the same time, it’s an encouraging sign about the modern value of these portraits, created so long ago for a sensible, practical purpose. Today, they are rightly cherished, not just as decorative objects or simple pieces of family history, but true works of art.

Right after the auction closed, I wrote to a good friend of mine, an experienced collector of folk art portraiture. “Belknap for $17,000,” I emailed. “Did you see that? That was nuts!” 

“Yes, I saw it,” he wrote back. “I was bidding on it as I’m guessing you were too.” 

Small world! 

I was still baffled about how this could’ve happened, especially for a portrait of an adult. Child portraits are much more likely to command such prices. “What is it about this one?” I inquired. “Quality and condition?”

He told me: “This is not a routine picture.  In my opinion it is one of the best portraits of an adult that I have ever seen. This is the best of the best, and deserves a stellar price.”

And it certainly achieved that. I hope that we will see this portrait again, perhaps in a museum or a prominent sale, somewhere in the auspicious folk art scene. “Lady with a Bible” rightly deserves to be seen, admired, and given the due respect that folk art portraiture was long denied. 

It’s interesting how that phenomenon has developed. With time and effort, folk art has gradually gained prestige and shaken off the stigma of terms like “primitive,” “naive,” and other clumsy synonyms. The collectors and scholars Agnes Halsey Jones and Louis C. Jones discussed the issues of terminology in their vital 1960 work, “Newfound Folk Art of the Young Republic”: 

The paintings in this collection can, for the most part, best be described as "non-academic," a word which, unfortunately, falls sharp and acid from the tongue. Intellectually it is right; aurally it is wrong. With all its handicaps, we have preferred the term "folk art.”

Interestingly, they also proposed, in this article, that the 20th century movements of modernism and abstraction gave rise to the popularity of folk art. They argued that the deliberate departure from academic tradition, in these new and groundbreaking fashions, prompted viewers to recognize and respect the value of other art that was not fully realistic.

Indeed, it was artists like Picasso, Gauguin, Modigliani, Van Gogh, and Matisse who prepared our eyes to see and our minds and emotions to appreciate this material without the shamefaced prejudices which sent the paintings into attics and storerooms, or worse, in the late 19th century. It is no accident that our American primitives were rediscovered by very modern European artists in the early 20th century, and have become popular here only in the last generation.

Perhaps they are onto something about Picasso and Gauguin. I’m sure that that point is partly true, at least in terms of making the elevated “art world” recognize the value of folk art. But I also think it is possible to appreciate these portraits in their own context, without setting them beside modernism or abstraction. After all, painters like Belknap were not deliberately making subversive statements like these 20th century innovators. They were simply representing their portrait clients as well and accurately as they could, using a consistent self-taught style that worked for them. 

But the Joneses are spot-on about those “shamefaced prejudices.” In the decades after the daguerreotype was popularized, folk portraiture inevitably fell out of fashion. Personally, I mourn the loss of those kinds of portraits — not for the sake of sentimentality, but because life-size paintings captured personality, color, and detail in a way that a simple daguerreotype could not. How are we supposed to know the color of a beautiful dress, or admire the details of a lace bonnet, from a tiny image in black-and-white? But the decline of folk portraiture could not be avoided, as the scholar Jacqueline Oak wrote in “A Perfect Likeness”: 

As the century progressed, romantic portraits by academically trained artists and landscape painting—prompted by western exploration and settlement—captured the fancy of the art world. Photography became the chosen medium for likenesses for the middle class and the painted portrait returned to its origins as a commodity for the elite. Through a combination of factors—economic, scientific, and cultural—folk portraiture, which had represented a type of status and gentility for many Americans, succumbed to technology and changing taste and never flourished again.

The folk tradition is a far cry from those “romantic portraits.” Compare, for instance, our Belknap lady, and this fanciful portrait of a lady, dating to 1910: 

The one on the right would be far more likely to be admitted to an art exhibition, but the one on the left tells us much more about the subject. A folk artist would be highly unlikely to create a painting like the image on the right — after all, it does not capture her likeness. (I know of only one folk painting depicting a sitter from behind, probably a child painted postmortem.) These traditional folk portraits were symbols of success, but they were not indulgences or flights of fancy. As the Joneses wrote: 

“Amateur" applies accurately enough to [certain works], but too many of the others were, quite literally, by professionals: artists who painted for a living... The results are documents which give us a better sense of the people and their lives than we can gain from the formal portraits or the romantic genre paintings of the same period. The emphasis is on what the artist has to say rather than how he says it, on content rather than style. Yet over and over again these artists unconsciously achieve a stylistic success.

Neither Belknap, nor the Lady with the Bible herself, could have imagined this portrait would sell for $17,000 on its own merit. Not even to a family member (that we know of), but purely because it is a beautiful work of art.

But those “shamefaced prejudices” the Joneses mentioned are not hyperbole. Look at this 1917 letter sent to the early folk art historian Thomas Hovey Gage (also known for his work on Peckham) in response to his efforts to research Zedekiah Belknap:

“No great pretension, and perhaps of even less merit”? 

I guess Belknap got the last laugh.