$120,000
Ammi Phillips (American, 1788-1865) Portrait of a Child in a Pink Dress Seated on a Red Cushion, with a Spaniel. Unsigned. Oil on canvas, 31 x 25 in., in original molded grain-painted wooden frame. Condition: Very minor scattered retouch. Provenance: The collection of Dean Nelson, Spruce Creek, Pennsylvania, acquired by Peter Tillou from a collection in State College, Pennsylvania. Literature: This portrait is illustrated and commented on in the Hudson Valley Regional Review , September, 1987, Volume 4, Number 2, in an article titled "Ammi Phillips's Portraits with Animals," by Leigh Rehner Jones and Shirley A. Mearns. They write: "Nineteen of the surviving portraits by Ammi Phillips depict animals, and these are some of the most appealing works by the Connecticut-born artist." The work is illustrated on p. 74. Exhibitions: The Folk Art Museum, New York, and Williams Benson Museum, Storrs, Connecticut. Note: Painted during the Kent period in folk portraitist Ammi Phillips' celebrated career, the portrait of a young boy in a pink dress with a spaniel displays the clarity of arrangement, style, and color for which Phillips is best known. This particular composition will be familiar to scholars and collectors, who have codified it in the informally named "red dress group," a number of portraits that Phillips painted during the 1830s of young children in red dresses with pets. Most of his subjects in that group are seated on the sort of fringed footstool on which t Read more…
Auctioneer:
Skinner
Date:
2013-03-03
