AFA 18th Anniversary

2018 Antiques & Fine Art 119 Jacob Frymire (ca. 1770–1822) Portrait of Daniel Clarke, Penn., 1791 Oil on canvas, 31 x 26 in. Gift of Julie Lindberg in memory of Carl Michael Lindberg, College of William & Mary, Class of 1962 (2016.100.2) Many historical portraits show male subjects posed with one hand thrust through the opening of their coats or waistcoats. Modern-day viewers often interpret this as a way for artists to avoid painting hands, or assume that the subject’s hand must have been cold! But the reason is rooted in society’s perceptions of what make human bodies appear graceful. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, men and boys were urged to assume their hand-in-the-waistcoat pose for many aspects of day-to-day deportment, even the simple act of sitting. Jacob Frymire’s portrait of Daniel Clarke portrays the youth in a sophisticated and fashionable pose. We the People observes this prolific form of American portraiture through some three dozen canvases created by both well-known and unidentified artists working from the decades immediately following the American Revolution through the Civil War. The exhibition features visitor favorites alongside new acquisitions never before seen by the public. It also addresses common misconceptions in the study of folk portraiture, dispelling age-old myths such as the idea that itinerant artists pre-painted the bodies of their sitters or that artists avoided painting a male subject’s hand by placing it in his waistcoat. The exhibition, which gives us a glimpse into the lives of the men, women, and children who helped to shape this country, is on view through December 2020. For more information, visit www.colonialwilliamsburg.com. Laura Pass Barry is the Juli Grainger Curator of Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia. 1. It was Rockefeller’s gift that forms the nucleus of a remarkable museum built in her honor in 1957 that survives as the oldest operating institution of its kind. Today, AARFAM encompasses a broad and comprehensive array of more than 7,600 American folk paintings, drawings, sculpture, textiles, toys, furniture, ceramics, and decorative use- ful wares. 2. The Rockefellers’ son Winthrop felt that, of all his mother’s collecting interests, her love of and appreciation for American folk art was probably the greatest. He remarked that well after her collection was given to the Foundation, she “loved to spend time with the Collection and to give private names to some of the naïve, yet charming, portraits that appealed especially to her.” See American Folk Art from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1959), pp. 5–6.