AFA 18th Anniversary

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 117 William Anderson Roberts (1837–1899/1900) The Russell Girls with Cat , Yanceyville, N.C., ca. 1866 Oil on canvas, 45½ x 39¾ in. Museum purchase, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Lee Caviness Jr. (2014.100.2) A prolific artist, William Anderson Roberts rendered likenesses in North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. He began painting around the age of twenty. His surviving appointment books indicate roughly 106 portraits were completed in Caswell County, North Carolina, his home. Roberts enlisted in the Confederate Army early in the Civil War, although his actual time in combat was limited. Afterwards, he resumed his artistic activity, and it was during this time that he completed the portrait of sisters Annie “Fannie” Elizabeth and Sarah Bell Russell. John James Trumbull Arnold (1812–1865) Portrait of Mary Mattingly, Mount Savage, Md., 1850 Oil on canvas, 38 x 31½ in. Museum purchase, the Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections Fund (2014.100.1). In mid-October 1850, itinerant painter John James Trumbull Arnold captured the likenesses of three Mattingly family members. One was this portrait of Mary, the young daughter of Ellen and Sylvester Mattingly of Mount Savage, Maryland. The artist inscribed the back of the portrait with the subject’s name and date. The painter also used the same ornate script on his pen- and-ink self-portrait, in the Colonial Williamsburg collection. In the inscription, he described himself as a “professor of penmanship,” an occupation that may have predisposed him to a heavy reliance on linear definition of hands and facial features.