Watercolor portrait of James M. Mitchell Amesbury, Essex County, Massachusetts, circa 1835

Watercolor, gouache, paint, ink and pencil on paper, mounted on wood backing

Inscribed verso, pencil: James M Mitchell/Amesbury Mass.

Robert E. Cleaves, Groton, Massachusetts
Mr. and Mrs. William F. Carr, Chicago
Bert and Gail Savage, Strafford Center, New Hampshire, 1985
David A. Schorsch, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1985

American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 72, fig. 41

Overall condition is very good.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

This portrait follows a tradition well established by the 1830S of intimate watercolors that depict standing or sitting figures in settings with colorful, patterned floor coverings.¹  It is one of a small group of watercolors attributed to an unidentified artist, though the work is similar to watercolors by the recently identified Nantucket artist Phebe Fitzgerald Barney (1814-1871).² Barney worked on Nantucket during the 1830s, using thin watercolor washes over pencil drawings on off-white paper.³Her known watercolors all have wood backboards with secondhand inscriptions, a trait shared by this watercolor of James Mitchell. The child's face is drawn in ink with a fine point and colored overall with a thin layer of white paint; rosy dabs accent his cheeks. The eyebrows are delineated in a distinctive fashion, each in an arc with short, sharp vertical strokes. One side of the nose is lightly extended from the curve of the brow, with the nostrils indicated by short slashes. The boy holds a bright red book in one hand, and his figure conveys a sense of quiet, his gray skeleton suit contrasting strongly with the plain light background.

Unlike Barney's watercolor portraits, however, which show plain planked floors, the artist who portrayed Master Mitchell placed each of his or her subjects on a densely patterned floor cover. The geometric design in salmon, brown, and green covers the bottom quarter of the watercolor and grounds the boy's vertical figure in the strong horizontal plane. The floor covering is most likely a painted floorcloth or an ingrain carpet, a type of flat-woven reversible carpet that was imported into American cities by the mid-eighteenth century.⁴ By the time this watercolor was painted, ingrain carpets were still expensive but available domestically, sharing technology with the woven coverlet industry as it developed. -S.C.H.

¹ Other artists who relied on this formula include J.H. Davis and J. Evans.
² Other works by this unidentified artist include the portraits of Mary Williams and Master Williams and a portrait of a child in a red dress; see Rumford, American Folk Portraits, pp. 261, 262, and Dennis R, Anderson, Three Hundred Years of American Art in the Chrysler Museum (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum, 1975), p, 60, respectively.
³ See the Barney entry by Margaret Moore Booker in Michael A. Jehle, ed., Picturing Nantucket: An Art History of the Island with Paintings from the Collection of the Nantucket Historical Association (Nantucket, Mass.: Nantucket Historical Association, 2000), pp. 71-72.
⁴ Helene Von Rosenstiel, American Rugs and Carpets from the Seventeenth Century to Modern Times (New York: William Morrow, 1978), pp. 90-111, 174.