AFA Summer 2019

Summer 78 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com Nelson Cook, a Canadian- born artist who traveled between Buffalo and Saratoga Springs, New York, created this full-length likeness of Millard Powers Fillmore, known as “Powers.” The son of Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth President of the United States, he studied law at Harvard and then served as his father’s secretary during his presidential administration. The sheer size of the work was meant to impress, particularly at a time when the prosperous usually commissioned only a half- portrait that showed the subject from waist to crown. One of only three life-sized portraits by Cook, the Fillmore portrait was designed to occupy a significant spot in an equally significant house. With its background landscape that depicts Dunkirk, New York, and Lake Erie, this work emulates the grand manner of European and British portraiture. The figure of Powers glances to the viewer’s right and is placed high, so he literally looks down and away from the viewer, creating both a deliberate physical and physiological distance from the viewer. Powers leans on his double- barreled percussion cap shotgun in a casual, proprietorial pose, flanked by his trusty gun dog. He wears what was then known as “genteel undress,” meaning informal wear. This included an unbuttoned tartan frock coat popularized by Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, himself an avid hunter, and the button fly trousers that became fashionable in the mid-1840s. Contributing to his more casual attire, Powers wears a loosely knotted neckerchief and a broad brimmed Panama straw hat. The subject also sports a glass powder horn to keep his gun powder dry, perhaps made in the Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, glasshouse, and a bandolier shot holder. To contemporary viewers, the portrait presented an ideal image of American manhood; the man who has a successful professional career but who yet retains the skills of the hunter. Nelson Cook (1809–1892), An American Sportsman, Millard Powers Fillmore, 1850. Oil on bed ticking, 79 x 56½ inches.