Paintings Worth Looking At

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. 

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. 

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. 

In which an investigation starts with folk art, visits the Netherlands, and ends up back at folk art. I'll admit, I got lucky with this one. I was looking on a stock photo website for “portrait painting” (as one does) and, several dozen pages into the mixed results, I stumbled upon this lovely lady.   Her slightly primitive rendering and sincere charm reminded me of American folk art pastel portraits, an area I’ve spent quite some time researching. I wondered if she might be connected to the works of New England itinerant artists, such as Micah Williams or James Martin . She’s not an exact match, but there’s a vague likeness in the direct eye contact, the soft flat shading of the skin, and the straightforward, almost confrontational, framing of the portrait subject.

In which a mysterious floating head is reattached to a Dutch nobleman, and a grandson copies his grandfather to impersonate him postmortem. It started out, back then, as “Portrait That Has Something A Bit Off.”  This humble yet striking picture originally turned up on a stock photo website , uploaded — in the infinite wisdom of automatic titling — as “Man In Black Jacket Holding White Plastic Tube.”  It’s a mystery where a gentleman from 1648 in the Netherlands might have got hold of plastic.  So I stashed it in my digital notes, with the aforementioned label. There is something a bit off: it’s remarkably good. Despite the gap in centuries, the man feels relatable. He tiredly and wistfully gazes out of his frame, choked by his stifling starched ruff. (Some sitters wear the ruff. For other sitters, the ruff wears them.) Fashion aside, it’s clearly a picture of great quality. The execution is intricate, the brushwork precise, the fabric crisply and delicately rendered. The man’s ruddy s