ON FINDING A FOLK ART TREASURE By Sue Whitman Ten-thousand pieces of American folk art were culled in selecting the exhibits for the current Flowering of American Folk Art show, according to the Whitney Museum catalogue. I marvel that we can boast of 10,000 pieces - photographed, labeled and catalogued. So careless are we with our national heritage. So indifferent we have been to our art. I recently found two new additions to our folk art legacy, bold and beautiful portraits of a minister and his wife by Ammi Phillips. The survival of these paintings is a modern miracle, considering the ignorance and disinterest surrounding them. On the off chance that you are as untutored in American folk painting as I (an unlikely assumption) let me explain that Ammi Phillips was an itinerant portrait painter who established himself and family in one after another of the communities in the New York-Connecticut borderlands, then made his way with his horse and wagon from house to house to paint the portraits of the local inhabitants. Between 1829 and 1834, he settled his family on 45 acres of good Dutchess County farmland, and sallied forth from there to paint his neighbors. The fact that his subjects were his neighbors and his friends gave him keen insight in depicting their individualities. His portraits were never mere likenesses, but compelling and penetrating character studies of a proud and independent people. He painted them with dignity, sympathy and beauty. The story of the discovery began on a hot day last July when the four of us - my daughter, son, daughter-in-law and myself - converged on the Victorian family home in Dutchess County to clear it for sale. That Friday afternoon when we arrived from Washington and Boston we found, to our dismay, that the tenants were still in the house. We had until Monday at 4 to deliver the place "broom clean" to the new owner, a young upcoming IBM executive flying in from Holland to sign the papers. He had seen in this spacious, high-ceilinged house the life style he dreamed of, and bought it on sight, with plans to renovate later the forty-year-old kitchen. I had dallied over selling Netherwood. When the last of the older generation passed away I could neither bring myself to part with the home which had meant so much to our family, nor sever ties with the community which we cherished. Nor could I think what to do with twelve rooms of furniture and artifacts, plus an attic full of who-knows-what. Our young people would soon be starting homes of their own, and bless them, shared the family affection for their heritage. But what pieces would they really want when the time came? So I had shipped some of the "treasures" home, packed others off to the barn, and rented the rest to a family desperately in need of a large furnished house. Early Saturday morning, with the tenants more or less out, we began to work fast and furiously dividing the accumulation of my parents' life time, room by room, into three piles - trash, sell or save. The attic was the last to be cleared. What to do with it all? Arena Stage, a repertory theatre company in Washington, had agreed to take old clothes,
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