Paintings Worth Looking At

There is no shortage of attribution corrections to be made, and interesting portraits to showcase! Here is another assortment of them, all posted first on Facebook and Instagram . While my work on the American Folk Portrait Wiki has precluded the writing of any extensively in-depth articles recently, I hope to keep sharing information whenever I can. - - - William W. Kennedy / Ammi Phillips / Sturtevant Hamblin / Royall Brewster Smith / Erastus Salisbury Field / John Bradley  

Recently, I’ve gotten into the habit of posting, on social media, a selection of portraits in need of re-attribution - or which have recently received new attributions! Here is the first group from March thus far. Please do stop over to the Facebook or Instagram pages if you’d like to have a look at these before they arrive on the blog. - - - Aaron Dean Fletcher / George G. Hartwell / The Empire Sofa Limner / Micah Williams / Joel Parks - - - AARON DEAN FLETCHER My very first feature was Fletcher, whose fabulous portrait of a small baby I spotted by chance in Google Images. Recognizing it as his work immediately, I was surprised to see it misattributed to Asahel Powers, and delighted to discover a wealth of treasures in the Smithsonian History Museum in which this baby resides. Peculiarly, among a Powers-attributed group of the same Vermont family – the Griswolds, of Springfield, VT – two are by Fletcher, and the other two, in fact, were painted by Asahel Powers and his mysteri...

In which a few intriguing social media discoveries are a good excuse to write about long-forgotten favorites. ( Daniel G. Lamont ) / ( Margaret B. Doyle ) / ( Otis Hovey ) - - -   DANIEL G. LAMONT (1817-1883) My initial foray into the Facebook antiques world was marked by the emergence of this curious and unique pair of portraits (Fig. 1). Shared to the “Early American” Facebook group on August 7, 2025 by an individual seeking more information about her mother’s collection, the style immediately struck me as familiar. I re-posted them as an open question, then quickly edited it once the answer occurred to me: Daniel G. Lamont. The more I looked at the portraits, the more I was convinced. They have a striking likeness to the portraits of Abby Weare Stone and Charles James Fox Stone (Fig. 2), a signed 1851 pair . 

One of the most vexing questions of the Prior-Hamblin School is how to tell five artistic hands apart. Now we have six. Recent research has revealed there's a particular version of the “flat style” face that doesn’t conform to any of the five known and documented Prior-Hamblins. After compiling and comparing many dozens of paintings, it has become obvious: we have a new artist on the horizon. Many thanks to Dr. Paul D'Ambrosio of Fenimore Museum for proposing that there is another unknown painter! I had gathered together a compilation, but was uncertain what to make of it. I consider this an incredibly exciting development. Like the rest, this artist paints highly distinctive eyes, which can serve as an attribution guide. Read on for the Eyes of the Sixth Prior-Hamblin. - - - 

When the matched paintings of “ Newburgh Children ” and “ Palmer Children ” first appeared at Christie’s 2024 Important Americana (lots 429/430) , they were attributed to Edwin Weyburn Goodwin. But they bore a striking resemblance to the fine and elaborate portrait, “Miss Tweedy of Brooklyn,” attributed to Orlando Hand Bears for decades. As it turns out: Bears didn’t paint Miss Tweedy (real name Eliza Bird Tweedy.) Nor did he paint the identical portrait of Mary Louisa Bird — Eliza’s younger sister! And the “Tweedy-Bird Limner” was born.