The Erie Canal and New York State folk art

Magazine Antiques, April, 1999 by Paul S. D'Ambrosio

An exhibition entitled Empire State Mosaic: The Folk An of New York, organized by Paul D'Ambrosio, is on view at the Fenimore Art Museum at the New York State Historical Association until December 31.

1 For the effects of commercial enterprise on the methods of nineteenth- century New England portrait painters see David Jaffee, "One of the Primitive Sort: Portrait Makers of the Rural North, 1760-1860," in The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation: Essays in the Social History of Rural America, ed. Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1985), pp. 103-137.

2 The most recent study of the Erie Canal and its impact on New York state is Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (Hill and Wang, New York, 1996).

3 For a discussion of the evolution of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century folk portraiture see Mary Black, "Patroon Painters to Republican Limners: Artisan Painting in America," in Face to Face: M. W. Hopkins and Noah North (Museum of Our National Heritage, Lexington, Massachusetts, 1988), pp. 11-16.

4 The information about Hopkins is from Face to Face, pp. 39-51 and 120-121.

5 For the information about North see ibid., pp. 57, 59, and 107.

6 See Paul S. D'Ambrosio and Charlotte M. Emans, Folk An's Many Faces: Portraits in the New York State Historical Association (New York State Historical Association, Cooperstown, 1987), pp. 116-122.

7 Tammis Kane Groft, The Folk Spirit of Albany: Folk Art from the Upper Hudson Valley in the Collection of the Albany Institute of History and Art (Albany Institute of History and Art, Albany, New York, 1978), pp. 40-41.

8 Agnes Halsey Jones, Rediscovered Painters of Upstate New York, 1700-1875 (Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, New York, 1958), p. 58. Kennedy's scene may be derived from a lithograph by W. H. Tuthill (w. 1825-1832) of fire engine No. 41 of the Clinton Fire Department. It was published in Cadwallader D. Colden, Memoir, Prepared at the Request of a Committee of the Common Council of the City of New York, and Presented to the Mayor of the City, at the Celebration of the Completion of the New York Canals (New York, 1825), opposite p. 391. The lithograph shows a picture of the Aqueduct Bridge at Little Falls, New York, painted on the back of the fire engine.

9 Patricia Anderson, The Course of Empire: The Erie Canal and the New York Landscape, 1825-1875 (Memorial An Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, 1984), p. 64.

10 Jones, Rediscovered Painters of Upstate New York, p. 59; and Colden, Memoir, opposite p. 296.

11 William C. Ketchum Jr., Potters and Potteries of New York State, 1650-1900 (Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York, 1987), p. 285.

12 Barbara Franco, "Stoneware made by the White family in Utica, New York," in The Art of the Potter: Redware and Stoneware, ed. Diana and J. Garrison Stradling (Main Street/Universe Books, New York, 1977), p. 129.

13 Ketchum, Potters, p. 135.