HDeading 1

Description:

 

William W. Kennedy was born in 1817 in New Hampshire and worked as a portrait painter in New Bedford, Massachusetts; Ledyard, Connecticut; and Berwick, Maine from 1845 through 1847. He moved to Maryland in 1849 or 1850, lived at various locations in Baltimore with his wife and three children until 1869, and died in 1871.[i]

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William W. Kennedy is part of a stylistically associated group of American folk artists known as the Prior-Hamblin School. The Prior-Hamblin School consisted of five main artists: William Matthew Prior (1806–1873), his brother-in-law Sturtevant J. Hamblin (1817–1884), William W. Kennedy (1817– 1871), George G. Hartwell (1815–1901), and E.W. Blake (active circa 1840–1850s). The group’s size increases if other family members who were artisan painters are included. The term "Prior-Hamblin School” was not used in these artists’ lifetimes: It emerged among art scholars, collectors, and dealers in the 1950s, following the foundational research of renowned American Folk Art scholar Nina Fletcher Little, to describe the stylistic similarities – remarkably close at times – between the works of Prior, Hamblin, and other artists.

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This pair of Stetson portraits was recently re-attributed from William M. Prior to William W. Kennedy by Emily Esser, an American Folk Art specialist who focuses on Kennedy and the Prior-Hamblin School. Esser and her colleagues have taken a deep dive into the biographies and stylistic elements attributable to each artist, advancing scholarship while adding nuance to previous interpretations.

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In American Folk Art portraiture, the props that appear in paintings are rarely accidental. A book might signify literacy, a rose virtue. As seen In Figure 1, Mr. Elijah Stetson holds a very specific historical document in his right hand: the newspaper Herald of Freedom, Volume 10, No. 39, dated Friday, December 20, 1844, and published in Concord, New Hampshire.
This particular prop transforms the portrait from a simple likeness into a declaration of moral conviction of both the sitter and the artist, because the Herald of Freedom was a radical abolitionist newspaper edited by Nathaniel Peabody Rogers, a tireless advocate for enslaved peoples’ immediate emancipation, women’s rights, animal rights, and temperance

 

[i] Excerpted from Paul S. D'Ambrosio and Charlotte Emans, Folk Art's Many Faces: Portraits in the New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, 1987, pp. 107; and Beatrix T. Rumford, ed., American Folk Portraits: Paintings and Drawings from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Boston, 1981, pp. 138-139.

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