“Those Wandering Thugs of Art” Nineteenth-century Itinerant Painters
by JACQUELYN OAK Education Department, Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont
Itinerant Artist Scene, unknown artist. Northeastern United States, c.1845, watercolor, 11½ x 15 inches. Museum purchase.
In earlier centuries artists depicted wealthy businessmen, clergymen, distinguished magistrates, and other members of the powerful elite. Folk painters democratized painting by picturing rural merchants; country doctors and lawyers; ship captains; artisans; and newly prosperous families, thus documenting a new social order. By the 1820s, members of a new middle class sought portraits of themselves in record numbers. John Neal, one of America’s first art critics, wrote about the proliferation of folk portraits in 1829: merican folk portraiture had yielded to “Already they are quite as necessary as the chief part changing tastes and new technology when of what goes to the embellishment of a house, and far Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. of Boston more beautiful than most of the other furniture.... You wrote about folk artists in the July 1861 issue have but to look at the multitude of portraits, wretched of Atlantic Monthly: “Recollect those wandering Thugs as they generally are.... You can hardly open the door of of Art, whose murderous doings with the brush used a best-room anywhere without ... being surprised by the frequently to involve whole families; who passed from picture of somebody plastered to the wall and staring at one country tavern to another, eating and painting their you with both eyes and a bunch of flowers.” way,—feeding a week upon the landlord, another week To meet the demand, coach, house, and sign painters upon the landlady, and two or three days apiece upon as well as talented (and not-so-talented) amateurs the children, as the walls of those hospitable edifices attempted to capture a “correct likeness,” the term most too frequently testify even to the present day.” often used by these artisan painters. Levels of formal Holmes’s criticism notwithstanding, hundreds of training, if any, varied greatly. A scant few may have folk painters documented the faces of middle-class studied the work of well-known, academic painters in Americans, producing works of art that have been urban areas; some learned from other contemporaries; studied and appreciated for decades. Moving from place still others had access to instructional art books and to place as demand dictated, these artists recorded manuals that were becoming available to the general thousands of likenesses of family, friends, neighbors, populace. As a result, the quality of the artwork differed political allies, business acquaintances, and strangers. In significantly. so doing, they created one of the largest bodies of work Working methods differed from artist to artist. Some in American art. traveled from town to town, advertising their services
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Historic New England Fall 2020
