Phillips's earliest recorded portraits are that of Rev. Phillips's work satisfied the local standard, and within two years he was receiving regular portrait commissions from community leaders in this area of western Massachusetts. Samuel Barstow of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, dated October 6, 1811, mentioning small portraits he had commissioned of himself and his wife. Phillips was recorded in the diary of Dr. He enters the documentary record as an artist himself in 1809, at the age of 21, with advertisements in both The Berkshire Reporter and a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, tavern proclaiming his talent for painting "correct likenesses" distinguished by “perfect shadows and elegantly dressed in the prevailing fashions of the day.” Although Phillips also advertised his talent for "fancy painting, silhouettes, sign and ornamental painting", he soon specialized as a portraitist. Rueben Moulthrop, Nathaniel Wales, Uriah Brown, and Samuel Broadbent are all artists traced by documents to the area, and stylistic elements of their work can be seen in Phillips's early paintings. While it is unknown whether Ammi Phillip was entirely self taught, or had interacted or been taught by other artists in the Colebrook, Connecticut area, there were such painters whose work Phillips might have seen growing up. In 18 he was living in Curtisville (now Interlaken), Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In 1855 he was recorded as "artist", and was living in New Marlborough, Massachusetts. ![]() ![]() In the 1850 census, Phillips is recorded for the first time under the profession of portrait painter, now living in North East, New York. This land would be sold in part to its original owner as well as his brother-in-law, as the family moved yet again inside New York to a one-acre property in Amenia. He sold this property in 1828, moving to a forty-five acre property in Rhinebeck, New York. In 1820, he reported living in Troy, New York. Īmmi Phillips reported he and his family living in a different residence in every recorded census. Sarah Phillips would die at the age of four and a half. Jane would have four more children: Anna, Jane, Samuel, and Sarah Phillips. Laura Brockway died February 2, 1830, at the age of 38, and Phillips remarried Jane Ann Caulkins, twenty years his junior, five months later. Ammi Phillips and Lauren (Brockway) Phillips had four sons-Henry, George, William, and Russell Phillips-and one unknown daughter, although the order in which they had them is unclear, and one may not have survived. The first signed portraits produced by Phillips date from 1811, meaning he was by then beginning his career as a portrait painter. Laura Brockway's family had roots in Sharon, Connecticut. Phillips moved out of his family home at some point before 1810, and married Laura Brockway in Nassau, New York, on March 18, 1813. Phillips was born in Colebrook, Connecticut, on April 24, 1788, to Samuel Phillips (1760–1842), a farmer by trade and veteran of the Revolutionary war, and Millea Phillips (1763–1861), as one of eleven children, beginning a life that spanned the period from George Washington's presidency to the American Civil War. Henrietta Door, 1814, Princeton University Art Museum, an example of Ammi Phillips earlier work Ammi Phillip's body of work was expanded upon their discovery that the mysterious paintings of a "Kent Limner" and "Border Limner" were indeed his. His paintings hung mostly unidentified, spare for some recognition in the collections like those of Edward Duff Balken, for decades until his oeuvre was reconstructed by Barbara Holdridge and Larry Holdridge, collectors and students of American folk art, with the support of the art historian Mary Black. The most well known of this series, Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog, would be sold for one million dollars, a first for folk art. He is most famous for his portraits of children in red, although children only account for ten percent of his entire body of work. While his paintings are formulaic in nature, Phillips paintings were under constant construction, evolving as he added or discarded what he found successful, while taking care to add personal details that spoke to the identity of those who hired him. ![]() He is attributed to over eight hundred paintings, although only eleven are signed. ![]() His artwork is identified as folk art, primitive art, provincial art, and itinerant art without consensus among scholars, pointing to the enigmatic nature of his work and life. Mayer and Daughter, 1835-1840, Metropolitan Museum of ArtĪmmi Phillips (Ap– July 11, 1865) was a prolific American itinerant portrait painter active from the mid 1810s to the early 1860s in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York.
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