Collection: SOLD

A portrait miniature on ivory by Mary Way, CT, c.1800 of a young girl in a white dress with a pink ribbon.

A small oval portrait miniature on ivory by Mary Way, CT, c.1800. Portrayed is a young girl in a white dress with blue ribbon holding a bird.

One side shows the wife of William Sizri, named Catherine.

Sizri was the British Ambassador to the Netherlands, during the French Occupation in the Napoleonic days. The lady is shown at the end of the 1700's. The reverse is a young child. This miniature was saved out of Sizri's gold/leather dispatch box,which was destroyed during the German bombing of Middleburg(?).

The mother wears a black short sleeve dress with lace inset around her face and a lace bonnet. The child is dressed in white with a coral necklace and with pink ribbons. She holds a wreath of flowers that she removes from a basket on a small table at her side.

Note and card of William Hamilton Martin, who was the father of Ann Martin Schonegeval nee Martin. with the miniature which is in a small tin case says, "Please hand to Mrs. Marion Schonegeval nee Martin". The opposite side reads. " I gave this to Barton Emmanuel to deliver to your hands to do with as yoou proposed, when opportunity offers, in your family". Love you, Boost (?).

Case 3" high without bail. Background rub on mother's side 1/3 inch.

 The image is a positive backed by paper and now archivally framed and preserved. Its rarity lies both in its size and in the use of the plate to make a single image, an expensive endeavor. Few people could have afforded to have this image made, (they could have had each person photographed separately and probably used less glass) I wonder if, perhaps, the photographer was a member of the group or if it was an expensive job he was asked to produce. By portraying them together he was able to give them a complex setting that would not have worked for individual portraits where one background image would have appeared, repeated, as boring and artificial.

The framing style and the period cultural subject matter suggest to me that this work was once part of the vast collection of Phillip Isacson of Maine.

Superb coloration makes this bowl by Edwin and Mary Scheier a fine example of the type. The blue, with areas of yellow within, varies from a color of medium intensity to one of high intensity beyond the level usually acheived. Dark blue forms a band at the rim and on the foot ring. These features make a small tea bowl with incurvate sides and inscribed decoration figuring the imagery of Jonah and the Whale, which is often seen drawn by Edwin, into a dramatic and unusual work.
New Hampshire. Circa 1950. 4 3/4 inches high x 5 1/2 inches wide at center. Excellent condition.

"Written by William Harrison Green in, Litchfield jail, State of Connecticut"

The Reverend Wm. Green, originally from Centerville, New York, abandoned his wife there and went to Cornwall, CT. He was an itinerant Methodist minister, and there he met and married a young widow with property. He also worked for P.T. Barnum when he ran for Congress and in a general store for his second wife's brother. His second wife died under suspicious circumstances, and after three trials Green was convicted of her murder and sentenced to the state prison for life and died there.

While there, Mr. Green went into an ornamental painting and illuminating business, and his work is beautifully decorative- highly colorful and quite charming. In addition to this piece, there is a similar example in the collection of the Litchfield Historical Society.
This work is drawn in red, blue and black ink (now brown) and shows two women placed between over-sized flowered branches. Their costumes are made up of banks of lines, dots and zig-zags, a totally abstract view of fabric pattern and cloth folds.
Sight size is 12 1/2 high and 7 3/4 inches wide. Conservation framed in a period frame measuring 16 by 11 inches.

This portrait, early in date for an American portrait, gets its charm from the very characteristics that make it different from those which follow more English traditions of the period. The child's gaze is at the viewer (or the artist) and has a casual affect, not the more formal impression of English portraiture. She is posed in a three-quarter length standing pose, and her hands on the basket match the sensitivity seen in her gaze. Her red dress is trimmed in white lace, a costume seen in other works of children attributed to Delanoy.

The attribution of this painting to Abraham Delanoy, Jr. is made through stylistic comparisons with known Delanoy portraits of the family of John Sherman of Connecticut. The artist was previously referred to as the Sherman Limner, and the girl in the red dress is very similar stylistically to the portrait of David Austin Sherman. Two portraits of Sherman children are considered lost, and this may be one of them. There is no question that our young girl and the Sherman family portraits are by the same hand.

In the portrait of Mrs. Sherman there is a very similar basket that contains the same fruits: a bunch of white and blue grapes, and two peaches. Delanoy is considered to have been one of the most gifted painters practicing in the Colonies in the 1780's.

Please see DOCUMENTATION for complete condition report and publication references. Oil on canvas, 30 x 22 inches.

This portrait epitomizes the graceful female poses of the artist's Kent period style (1829-1838) and is an example from a small group of portraits in which he exaggerated the sitter's wide oval neckline and adorned it with lace that forms a pendant, scalloped border to a dress with a tight upper sleeve design that balloons from the elbow before it tapers to a narrow cuff. Ann, like the other women from this group, rests one arm on a table with a book while holding an object, here a sprig of parsley.

Ann Miller was born in Somers, New York and married John M. Tompkins. They are buried in the cemetary of the Tomahawk Chapel in Somers, built by her brother Thomas Miller in 1837. The painting has descended in the family until this time.

Marvelously intense, serious yet sensitive, this young woman is a masterpiece of adult folk portraiture in the Prior tradition of producing inexpensive portraits quickly, yet capable, as was Prior, of perceptive observation and skillful design.

The details of translucent lace, a mosaic brooch, and a dreamy landscape that frames her upper body, surrounded otherwise by evening light and holding a red book that could not in the darkness be read.

The painting is wonderfully preserved and signed and dated on the backboard and frame. Later notation, pencil inscribed, relates, "French family her aunt Solt in Bristol/Aunt of Mrs. Lorenzo Sherman/ Kingston Rhode Island."

The work is 20 x 14 1/2 inches, on artists' board with a traditional wooden backboard behind it and framed in a mahogany veneered frame from which the liner has been removed to expose more of the painting's edges.

An unusual chalice from the Scheiers, probably an early interpretation of the Jonah and the Whale theme used by Edwin to decorate so many of his works. The pottery has all the grace of Mary's work: thin walls, perfect symmetry and almost indistinguishable turning marks, and a raised foot with an unarticulated lip edge.

Alternating female figures and fish form a ring around the center of the chalice. The women extend their arms so that each fish is held by two women. Both the female figures and the fish are inverted with each repeat.

The glaze varies from light blue inside to medium through a very dark blue on the exterior. The incised figues are of brown and yellow colors.

New Hampshire circa 1950. 7 inches high and 7 inches wide at the rim.

First purshased by Edith Gregor Halpert for her trend setting New York City gallery which sold American folk art to the first generation of collectors in the field early in the 20th century. 
A wonderful painting of a brown-eyed young woman posed in a full frontal pose, the symettry of the composition only varied by the inclusion of a leaf decorated branch painted on the crest rail of her chair.Her lace is expertly done, and in one hand she hold a small book. The picture is described by Halpert on her gallery label which still is attached to the back of the picture, as being an oval, an unusual format for these artists. The missing area beyond the bounds of an oval appears here to have been found and replaced, along with the addition of a rectangular gold leafed frame. Possibly this addition something that was originaally part of the painting and which was removed to accomodate an easily added oval frame to complete the ensemble.Or it may be a later re-construction, obviously making the image have an appearance more true to the artists' works than with out this addition.

23x28 inches framed. circa 1825, New York State.