Paintings Worth Looking At

Today, I was preparing a “portrait of the day” post, and hoped to include a batch of five paintings, rediscovered together, that served as a fantastic comparison point. They were found on the Frick Digital Collections , a consistently phenomenal resource. However - despite Frick offering a “large” download size - I found that that the result had crushed these nice crisp images into a tiny low-quality photo! Here’s how to fix that.  Firstly, please do note, for 99% of images on Frick, the “large” size (2048px) will be more than sufficient to approximate the quality of the original scan. You don’t need to go to all this trouble. However, when it is necessary, this process will permit you to extract Frick images in maximum quality, just the same as the high-resolution online viewer. 

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  

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. - - - 

The members of the so-called “Prior-Hamblin school” weren’t a school at all. Colleagues? Competitors? We still barely know. The five usual suspects - W.M. Prior, S.J. Hamblin, G.G. Hartwell, W W. Kennedy, and E.W. Blake - are constantly compared, mixed up, and conflated. However, despite their profound similarities, they all had their own quirks - especially when it comes to a pair of eyes. Part 1 of this post will address, illustrate, and explain the PHS's five unique methods for the so-called windows to the soul. The PHS problem has been tackled by exceptional folk art scholars for generations before me, so I don't expect this post to solve it. However, I hope that it will offer some useful clues.  Read on for the Eyes of the Prior-Hamblins.  - - -