Ammi Phillips

Ammi Phillips was one of many itinerant artists who painted portraits until the mid-1840s when photography rendered their craft virtually obsolete. Paintings were considered luxury items in early nineteenth-century America, but the “practical” art of portraiture made by limners (an eighteenth-century term that refers to artists working in a naïve style with little or no formal or academic training) flourished as the nation’s merchant and middle classes grew. A prolific and primarily self-taught artist, Phillips practiced his trade in the border areas of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York for more than fifty years, first advertising his services in 1809. Unlike other itinerant artists, Phillips often settled for several years at a time with his family in a location, working until the demand for his art had been exhausted. As was typical of his profession, Phillips often used standard poses, clothing, props, colors, and compositions in creating his portraits. Visual formulas that could be repeated enabled family members’ portraits to have a consistent look and allowed prospective clients to see how they themselves might be portrayed.

Phillips was a businessman as well as an artist, and his affluent clientele included politicians and landed gentry. His portraits symbolize the deeply held values and personal hopes and achievements of his sitters, filtered through his methods of production, stylistic development, and response to taste and needs. In the field of art history, “folk” or “naïve” paintings were once viewed primarily as historical artifacts that shed light on life and patronage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholars today increasingly value them as works of art as well. Although many of Phillips’s works are neither signed nor dated, scholars have traced an orderly progression of quite remarkably different styles.