Winter 2016

36 www.antiquesandfineart.com Winter Portrait of Nicholas Brown Seabrook (1739–1790) Attributed to the Payne Limner, Hanover County, Virginia, circa 1780 Oil on Canvas, 39 x 32½ inches Courtesy of Nye & Company, Bloomfield, N.J. It’s unusual when eighteenth-century American portraits surface pub- licly for the first time, even more so when five are discovered from the same family, and the family was from the south. Nicholas Brown Seabrook was a sea captain, Revolutionary War privateer, merchant, Richmond investor, and plantation owner. Born on his father’s estate on New Jersey’s Raritan Bay, he and wife, Mary, began their lives in and around New York. By late 1760s, circumstance and opportunity brought them to Virginia, first to Portsmouth, then Richmond and, ultimately, to Henrico and Hanover Counties. Seabrook commissioned five paintings comprising his own portrait, that of his wife, and of their three children sometime around 1780. The artist was likely a local painter whose identity is unknown, but is referred to as The Payne Limner, named after a large group of portraits of the family of Archer Payne; Payne’s Goochland County plantation was less than twenty-five miles from the Seabrook’s. In remarkable untouched condition and retaining what appear to be their original strainers, the group of five offers a rare opportunity to further the study of this early American artist and the world he inhabited. See pages 84–85 to view the full family. DISCOVERIES Collection of 17th- through 18th-Century Miniature Furnishings The Art and Mystery of the Dollhouse Concord Museum, Concord, MA Through January 15, 2017 For information call 978.369.9763 or visit www.concordmuseum.org While these items of early Americana may at first appear full-size, these eighteenth-century objects were actually made for a dollhouse. Collected during the past twenty-five years, they and other early furnishings are part of a larger collection that includes some of the earliest extant English dollhouses, including one dating to the reign of William and Mary that was once the property of pioneer dollhouse collector and author Vivien Greene. The collection is particularly rich in what is known as toy silver, produced by English and Dutch specialist silversmiths known as toymakers in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Objects illustrated here include a circa-1770 English gate-leg table and a late eighteenth-century Bergen County, New Jersey, chair with a cushion made by Robert Trent. On the table are a pair of silver tankards by David Clayton, London, ca. 1725; a silver salt by Francois Marcus Simons, the Hague, 1750; a cider jug by Frederik van Strast II, Amsterdam, 1743; a cluster candlestick by Michiel Maenbeke, Haarlem, 1690. The silver pipe rack on the floor is by William Beilby, London, 1735; it is just three inches tall.