AFA Winter 2017

2017 Antiques & Fine Art 89 Fig. 11: Charles Peale Polk (1767–1822), Portrait of Matilda Morrow, Jefferson County, Va. (now West Va.), ca. 1800. Oil on canvas, 28⅛ x 25⅛ inches. Gift of M. Knoedler and Company, Inc. (1957.100.12). Fig. 10: Charles Peale Polk (1767–1822), Portrait of Amos Morrow, Jefferson County, Va. (now West Va.), ca. 1800. Oil on canvas, 28⅛ x 25⅛ inches. Gift of M. Knoedler and Company, Inc. (1957.100.11). and Alexandria, where, in 1785, he advertised in the local paper his availability to take “likenesses in oil” after having “finished his studies under the celebrated Mr. Peale of Philadelphia in Portrait Painting.” 9 The training Polk received from his famous uncle is easily seen in the two portraits of Amos and Matilda Morrow (Figs. 10, 11). 10 The swagged red curtain used as a backdrop and the feigned oval framing devices appear in many of Peale’s pictures. Yet Polk’s effort to produce faithful likenesses distinguishes his work, in particular his fascination with detail, which was carried to the extreme by the inclusion of Amos’ scalp tumors. Although unsigned, the paintings were rendered in Jefferson County, West Virginia (then Virginia), most likely in the late 1790s, when the artist traveled to western areas of Maryland and Virginia. Artists on the Move: Portraits for a New Nation opens November 18, 2017 and runs through December 31, 2019 at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia. All images appear courtesy of the Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg. Laura Pass Barry is the Juli Grainger Curator of Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. 1. Josiah Murdoch Espy, Memorandum of a Tour Made by Josiah Espy in the United States of Ohio and Kentucky and Indiana Territory in 1805 (Cincinnati, OH, 1870). 2. January 1811 issues of the Norfolk Gazette and Public Ledger and Norfolk Herald. 3. “Cephas Thompson’s Memorandum of Portraits,” in the Boston Athenaeum. A reprint published privately in 1965 is available in at least twenty-two libraries, including the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library at Colonial Williamsburg. See also Deborah L. Sisum, “A Most Favorable and Striking Resemblance, ” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 23, no. 1 (Summer 1997): 1–101. 4. See Diary of William Dunlap (1766–1839): The Memoirs of a Dramatist, Theatrical Manager, Painter, Critic, Novelist, and Historian, Vols. 2–3 (New York: New York Historical Society, 1930), 489. 5. See Estill Curtis Pennington, Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley, 1802–1920 (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 2011) for a record of several dozen artists who traveled east to Philadelphia. 6. Edna Talbott Whitley, Kentucky Ante-Bellum Portraiture (Paris, KY: privately printed for the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1956), 783–4. 7. The author wishes to acknowledge Lea Lane for her research on the artist and his Virginia works. 8. Thomas R. Ryan, The Worlds of Jacob Eichholtz: Portrait Painter of the Early Republic (Lancaster, PA: Lancaster County Historical Society, 2003), 61–62. 9. The Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, 30 June 1785. 10. Polk’s portraits of the Morrows’ two daughters, also owned by Colonial Williamsburg, are similar in composition.