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.  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...