Book description
From 1802, when the young artist William Edward West began painting
portraits on a downriver trip to New Orleans, to 1918, when John
Alberts, the last of Frank Duveneck's students, worked in Louisville,
a wide variety of portrait artists were active in Kentucky and the
Ohio River Valley. Lessons in Likeness: Portrait Painters in Kentucky
and the Ohio River Valley, 1802--1920 charts the course of those
artists as they painted the mighty and the lowly, statesmen and
business magnates as well as country folk living far from urban
centers. Paintings by each artist are illustrated, when possible, from
The Filson Historical Society collection of some 400 portraits
representing one of the most extensive holdings available for study in
the region.
This volume begins with a cultural chronology -- a backdrop of
critical events that shaped the taste and times of both artist and
sitter. The chronology is followed by brief biographies of the
artists, both legends and recent discoveries, illustrated by their
work. Matthew Harris Jouett, who studied with Gilbert Stuart, William
Edward West, who painted Lord Byron, and Frank Duveneck are
well-known; far less so are James T. Poindexter, who painted charming
children's portraits in western Kentucky, Reason Croft, a recently
discovered itinerant in the Louisville area, and Oliver Frazer, the
last resident portrait artist in Lexington during the romantic era.
Pennington's study offers a captivating history of portraiture not
only as a cherished possession but also representing a period of
cultural and artistic transitions in the history of the Ohio River
Valley region.
""Estill Curtis Pennington's Lessons in Likeness... is
actually several books in one. On one hand, it is a history of
American art through the lens of a particular group of artists working
in a place that is at first the American frontier, and then later the
nation's heartland. It is also a biographical catalog of
severnty-seven artists who worked in Kentucky and along the Ohio
River. And finally, it chronicles the historical memory of a region by
drawing primarliy on the collection of the Filson Historical Society,
one of the region's premier repositories of local memory. Pennington,
a distinguished southern-art historian, manages to weave all three of
these books together in to one useful volume." -- Northwest Ohio
History" --
Estill Curtis Pennington has served in curatorial capacities for
the Archives of American Art, the National Portrait Gallery, the
Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the
Morris Museum of Art. His publications include William Edward West,
1788--1857, Kentucky Painter; Look Away: Reality and Sentiment in
Southern Art; Downriver: Currents of Style in Louisiana Art
1800--1950, A Southern Collection; and Kentucky: The Master Painters
from the Frontier Era to the Great Depression.
