Jacob Maentel (1778-?)

Art and Mary Feeman, Jonestown, Pennsylvania, 1977

"Small Folk: A Celebration of Childhood in America," Museum of American Folk Art and New York Historical Society, 1980-81
"Simplicity, a Grace: Jacob Maentel in Indiana," Evansville Museum of Art and Science, Evansville, Indiana, 1989/90
"Blue," New York, American Folk Art Museum, October 20, 2004-March 6, 2005

Black, Mary C. Simplicity, a Grace: Jacob Maentel in Indiana. Evansville Museum of Art and Science, Evansville, Indiana, 1989, frontispiece
Brant, Sandra and Elissa Cullman. Small Folk: A Celebration of Childhood in America. New York: E.P. Dutton in association with American Folk Art Museum, 1980, pp. 20-21
American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 35, figs. 10A-B

Some minor discoloration, minor creases in lower corners; repair at bottom of the tree trunk at the extreme left of mother's portrait.
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During the 1920s, portraits of John and Catherine Hinkle were deposited with the Historical Society of York County, Pennsylvania, initiating public interest in the artist of German extraction who painted the comfortable farmers and professionals and their families residing in the Pennsylvania German communities of Hanover, Lancaster, Lebanon, and other counties.¹ The portraits established a conventional format that the artist, now identified as Jacob Maentel, explored for many years, in portraits such as these, of a family from Elizabethtown. Around 1815 Maentel portrayed the Gardner family, each parent on a facing sheet with one child.² The figures loom front and center with a blue-tinged landscape receding far into the distance. Few houses dot the spare landscape, and despite their obvious material well-being, the family members appear to be pioneers in an unpopulated land.

When Maentel painted this unidentified Elizabethtown family, he repeated much of the formula used in the Gardner portraits. They are divided into two groups on facing sheets: the father with one daughter on the right, and the mother with two daughters on the left. They stand in a barren, blue-tinged landscape devoid of houses, yet the sense of dislocation experienced in the portraits of the Gardners is absent, perhaps because the landscape is closer to the picture plane. Viewed together, the family forms an arrangement that is reminiscent of the Danner sisters. The older girls are dressed in identical blue patterned dresses, their hair is swept up in a grown-up fashion, and one daughter appears to emulate her mother's stance. Like Mr. Gardner, this father holds his hat in his hand, its brilliant red lining drawing attention to the lower half of the composition and visually balancing the three figures in the mother's facing portrait. -S.C.H.

¹ See Black, "Folk Art Whodunit," pp. 96-105.

² Rumford, American Folk Portraits, p. 139.