Painting and Portrait Making in the American Northeast

This publication is a collection of papers presented at the Dublin Seminar of New England Folklife conference in June of 1994. The conference faced the usual early American silences and ambiguities on the subject of painting and portrait making. In many ways disinclined to patronize portrait painters, English immigrants to North America and their descendants were shy about discussing their motives or purposes when they did. The exchanges, instructions, and unstated agreements between painters and their sitters or between painters and patrons remained undocumented and elusive. In face of these larger uncertainties, speakers and their audience at the conference found welcome refuge in familiar details and human episodes.

The following is a list of the title and author of each paper:  Seventeenth-Century Boston Portraiture: Profile of the Establishment by Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Emergence of the Portrait Miniature in New England by Carol Aiken, The Brothers Blyth: Salem in Its Heyday by Bettina A. Norton, The Portraits of Richard and William Jennys and the Story of Their Wayfaring Lives by William Bright Jones, Frederick Mayhew, “Limner”: Portraits of Early-Nineteenth-Century New Bedford and Martha’s Vineyard by Andrew L. Thomas, New England and New York Portrait Makers in Canada, 1760-1860 by Lydia Foy, 1803 – The year of the Physiognotrace by Ellen G. Miles, Machine-Assisted Portrait and Profiled Imaging in New England after 1803 by Peter Benes, William J. Weaver’s Secret Art of Multiplying Pictures by Paul D. Schweizer, The Portrait Painter and Engraver: Cooperation and Conflict by Leah Upton, “The rising Prospect or the lovely Face”: Conventions of Gender in Colonial American Portraiture by Deborah I. Prosser, Facing Paintings and Painting Faces before Lavater by David Steinberg, Toward a New Understanding of the Aesthetics of “Folk” Portraits by Ellen Hickey Grayson, Erastus Salisbury Field: Mezzographs and Other Experiments with Photography in Portrait Painting by Diane E. Forsberg, Horace Bundy: Portraits Painted from Daguerreotypes by Lauren B. Hewes, “The Visage Once So Dear”: Interpreting Memorial Photographs by Deborah A. Smith.