But Gant says Marling’s style bears no resemblance to the limner’s works, and she has found no evidence he ever visited Guilford County. Another who dismissed Marling as the limner was Karen Cobb Carroll. In 1983-84, while she was archivist at the Greensboro Historical Museum, the museum exhibited its collection of limner’s work and additional paintings borrowed from families and others. For the exhibit, Cobb wrote a booklet, “Windows to the Past,” illustrated with limner paintings. “The Guilford Limner remains an enigma,” Carroll concluded. In taking up the hunt, Sally Gant has studied a claim by Sotheby’s, the famous art auction firm in New York, that identifies the Guilford Limner as a person named Depue. That name appeared on a painting done in 1820 of Mr. and Mrs. James Ragland of Clark County, Kentucky. Sotheby’s auctioned the painting in 2005. Estimated to sell for $15,000 to $20,000, it went for $24,000. Several other Clark County paintings, obviously done by the same artist, are unsigned, as are all other known paintings attributed to the Guilford Limner. Gant says the Kentucky paintings were brought to MESDA and compared with the limner’s works from Greensboro and elsewhere. “The consensus of opinion following the examination was that these (Kentucky) portraits do appear to be by the same hand,” Gant says. The way faces are depicted and furnishings in rooms are similar to those in the Kentucky paintings. One difference was the Kentucky subjects face each other, while in the Greensboro and Guilford paintings they stare straight ahead. Gant, though, isn’t absolutely sure the limner was Dupue. And if he was, who was Dupue, a name usually spelled Dupuy? “We have looked and looked for the name to show up in any records,” she says. “So far nothing.” She is intrigued, however, by words written in 1925 by the granddaughter of Elizabeth Dick Lindsay. Elizabeth Lindsay was the subject of a Guilford Limner painting nearly 100 years earlier. “The picture was painted by a traveling French artist about 1828,” the granddaughter, Josephine F. Wilson, wrote on a note taped to the back of the painting. That would seem to point to Dupue. The granddaughter was wrong about the year painted. The painting clearly says 1827, not 1828. Even though the Sotheby’s catalog of 2005 identified Dupue as the limner, the more recent Antiques Roadshow did not. Dupue was not mentioned,
The Art & Soul of Greensboro
with art expert Farmer saying of the person who did the paintings, “They’re still trying to figure out his name.” Gant says of Dupue, “I’d like to find one clue that he was ever in North Carolina.” She goes to a long row of card files in the research center. It contains 80,000 names of long -ago craftsmen and artists from Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee. When Gant heard the name Dupue, she hurried to the card file to check the Ds. She found only one Dupue or Dupuy in North Carolina. He was a silversmith in Raleigh, not a portrait painter. She found no Dupues or Dupuys in Kentucky, either. She discovered Dupuys, all silversmiths, in South Carolina, New Orleans and Philadelphia. She also learned that Dupuy was a common name in Virginia, but no one by that name was a craftsman or artist. She may try to research French painters of that period to see if Dupue from France spent time in America. In 1826 and 1827, when the limner was working in Greensboro and rural Guilford, the Greensboro Patriot newspaper had just begun publication. Gant has searched those early Patriots looking for ads placed by a visiting artist wanting to do portraits. Nothing. The limner must have relied on word-ofmouth advertising among a circle of Presbyterians. Gant also has perused the Patriot for names of people for whom mail was waiting at the post office. Because no mail delivery system existed then, names of people with unclaimed mail were published in the Patriot. Gant hoped a letter to Depue might show up. Nothing. Continuing the search for clues to the painter’s identity, she is checking family papers and other period documents related to subjects in the paintings. She wonders if a registration book might exist among descendants of the Albright family of the 1820s. The town’s only hotel at the time was owned by an Albright. George and Martha Albright were subjects of a limner painting. A registration book might contain the name Dupuy or Dupue or another guest who may have identified himself as a painter. Besides the Lindsay descendant’s reference to the “traveling French artist,” the only mention in family papers Gant has found so far about the paintings was written in 1852 by a widow who had posed years before. She said she was passing on “the likeness” of her and her husband to the next generation in the family “But unfortunately,” Gant says, “she didn’t say ‘my likeness painted by
February/March 2012
O.Henry 17