Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

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Wishing everybody a wonderful holiday season and many good things to come in the new year! Apologies for the silence - I've been working on a very large project (portraiture, naturally) which is still very much incomplete, but, I hope, will be worth the wait. Until then: it's been a pleasure to get to know so many incredible people in the world of American folk art - collectors and experts and curators alike. I appreciate each and every one of you, so very much. See you all in 2025 :)  

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The Elusive Kitten: How To Spot A Peckham (Deacon Robert Peckham)

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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. 
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Old Finds: A Nantucket Legacy (James S. Hathaway)

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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...
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The Haunted Nephew (Deacon Robert Peckham)

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In which a terrifying little boy goes missing, but winds up immortalized in a classic horror movie. The process of compiling an artist’s works is never easy. Especially in folk art, unsigned pieces are often scattered far and wide, identified only by stylistic quirks and a tenuous chain of linked names and family connections. So, for the sake of thoroughness, whenever I’m tracking down an artist, I scrounge around as many sites as I can get my hands on. You never know what might turn up.
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Eminently Artful? (Deacon Robert Peckham)

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The art of resemblance is a tricky one. People don’t like being committed to memory in an unflattering likeness (just ask any photographer). Historically, artists often chose to enhance a person’s appearance, smoothing out any blemishes and modifying their features for the better. Most frequently, portraits aspired towards whatever the contemporary ideal of conventional beauty happened to be, which varied widely over time and culture. However, the underlying principle is the same: Don’t make them look bad.
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Meet the Gages (Deacon Robert Peckham)

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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. 
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