FACES IN THE CROWD

The Philadelphia Show 2023

by alexandra kirtley

The Montgomery-Garvan Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Quite literally, faces animate a work of art. As the most revealing lens into the human psyche, faces are found on works of art of all media and while the motives and meanings may vary, the tradition of incorporating a face into a work of art—whether it be on a door handle or a painted canvas— transcends time and culture. Artists around the world have employed and continue to employ faces, and we see them as classical masks, emotive faces, and silly caricatures as well as likenesses—or portraits—of people who are intentionally anonymous and others who are well known; through time, some sitters have lost their identities. “Faces in the Crowd” celebrates the range of faces in a selection of works of American art, drawing attention to reading cues in individual portraits, identifying the range of faces incorporated in paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts, considering the artist or artisan who made the work of art, and observing the various emotions read in faces in the crowds— old and young, new and familiar—such as those who attend The Philadelphia Show each spring, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art throughout the year.

Two white painted tables (Figures 1 and 2) are punctuated by a slew of anonymous yet highly expressive masks. Their location on the rails and at the corners above the legs follows a Western tradition of incorporating masks into the design of such tables. Probably made in Ohio or the upper Midwest (Wisconsin) in the late 19th century, these tables have their anthropomorphic qualities exaggerated not only by the size of the masks but also by the multiple different faces that are depicted. Rather than being one idealized face that looks more like a medallion or coin or identifiable “type” of face, these faces are carved in deep two-dimensional relief and have distinctive features that suggest they may have been well known and easily identifiable by members of the community where the tables were made.

The cherubic face of the winged angel found on the front rail of one of the tables (Figure 1) and in triplicate on an eave ornament (Figure 3) derives from the image of seraphim in early Greek Orthodox Church icons, mosaics, and paintings; like on these works of art made in the United States, the seraphim was incorporated in individual works of art and decorative elements in architecture. Seraphim means “burning ones” because these particular angels were tasked with flanking and protecting God, who was understood to be “a consuming fire” (Hebrews 12:29). Their wings are often depicted in multiples of six (which we see here) and are notably full, dynamic, and expressive. On the eave ornament, the wings’ feathers spray out in a flourish and the top boney elements of the wings (called the coverts) are curvy volutes. The fussiness of the feathers of the seraphim stands in contrast to the placid surfaces of the faces, which are rendered with minimal details: broad foreheads and cheeks, almond-shaped eyes, long, thin noses, and pursed lips. Curiously, the uppermost face of the eave ornament is frowning, and the lower two faces are smiling, though each of their expressions seem almost forlorn. On the watch holder (Figure 4), the stylized and flowing curls of the hair serve a similar purpose as the wings by framing a face that is comprised of simple forms and smooth surfaces. That face stares out at the viewer, and the entire head is set above a temple-shaped frame in which a watch is hung for both safekeeping and observation. The location of the face may be a riff

Painted

28

Collection

Painted wood, iron

32”h x 22 1/2”w

Collection

Painted

28 1/2”h x 39 1/2”w x 26 1/2” d

Collection

12”h

Collection on the anthropomorphic qualities of architecture (and furniture), where the pediment is commonly referred to as the head. The wing-like hair may be an iteration of the familiar wings on a timepiece, referencing Virgil’s cautionary phrase tempus fugit, the time flies. The mask-like faces of the seraphim on the tables and eave ornament as well as the watch holder are designed and executed with a seeming knowledge of the reductive qualities found in the faces of Cycladic art of the 4th to 2nd centuries BCE that had been excavated, collected, copied, and printed and was widely available to American artists and artisans of the 19th century.

A ring of faces of exaggerated sizes, some atop figures, forms the outward surfaces of a carved marble bowl (Figure 5). Each face varies and while it is possible that the faces are caricatures of specific personalities, the exact meaning or derivation of the composition is unclear. Similarly, nineteenthcentury French milliners and wig makers used life size bust-like mounts made of papier-mâché to display hats and wigs (Figure 6). The shapes of the mounts vary, possibly corresponding to the various shapes of the women whose heads they were adorning, and many were imaginatively painted with facial features that also seem to be caricatures rather than portraits in the true sense.

The faces on the stoneware vessels (Figure 7) that are picked out in cobalt are adapted to the bulbous shape of the front of the various jugs. The noses, eyes, tooth-filled mouths, chins, and ears are separately molded and added to the vessels, while facial hair is suggested by incised lines. The spouts, handles, and openings make for provocative and often amusing crowns and headdresses on what were presentation vessels known as harvest jugs..

Distinctive from the stoneware vessels with cobalt decoration are the faces on the alkaline-glazed stoneware vessels made by enslaved Africans and free Black potters in the Edgefield district of South Carolina. On these much smaller vessels, the fine-grained white clay called kaolin (here, unglazed) has been used to form and emphasize the facial features. As the main ingredient in porcelain, kaolin was sacred to many including West Africans from Congo, where its use for ritual purposes is well documented. It is significant that some of the enslaved Africans who worked at Edgefield-area potteries had been illegally brought from Congo on the eve of the Civil War when many of these

About 9 1/2”h

Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Robert E. Booth, Jr vessels were made. Adrienne Spinozzi (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Ethan W. Lasser (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), and Professor Jason R. Young (University of Michigan), the co-curators of the ongoing exhibition “Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina” (currently at the MFA, Boston), have unearthed much of this provocative history. Enslaved African and later free Black potters made these vessels and the hundreds of thousands of other alkaline-glazed stoneware vessels that were sent all over the United States, creating prosperity for the white manufactory owners.

In 1904, Philadelphia Museum of Art curator and later director Edwin AtLee Barber (1851-1916) was among the first to acquire the so-called face vessels for a museum (on view in Gallery 216, the McCausland Gallery). He speculated in 1893 on their makers and their meaning using descriptive language that today we would condemn.1 In his recent essay, Professor Young places these vessels within the context of the 1895 poem “We Wear the Mask” by the Black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906). Young persuasively links the range of grimaces on the face vessels to the emotions that Black people felt and continue to feel in the face of racial prejudices.2 The faces on Edgefieldmade vessels survive as some of the most provocative expressions of Black artisans who, against the challenge of unimaginable conditions, refused to be suppressed fully.

Faces that appear in portraits address an audience or viewer, and the person is depicted in a setting that can be either contrived or personal. Portraiture was a crucial medium for early American artists, and patrons commissioned them intentionally, with the desire that their power and life’s achievements would be well portrayed and preserved for generations to come. Often we can see when the artist feels most inspired or moved by their sitter. For instance, perhaps the most compassionate renderings ever painted by the Swedish émigré artist Gustavus Hesselius (1692-1755) are his mid1730s portraits of the Lenape chiefs Tishcohan (or, He Who Never Wears Paint) and Lapowinsa (or, Gathering Fruit). These portraits are generously on loan to the PMA from The Atwater Kent Museum, Historical Society of Pennsylvania Collection, and the City of Philadelphia, and they can be found in the early American art galleries (Gallery 100, the Bill and Laura Buck Gallery). Portraiture fills the suite of early American galleries, with a large concentration by Philadelphia’s Charles Willson Peale

Oil on canvas

24” x 20”

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the gifts (by exchange) of R. Wistar Harvey, Mrs. T. Charlton Henry, Mr. and Mrs. J. Stogdell Stokes, Elise Robinson Paumgarten from the Sallie Crozer Hilprecht Collection, Lucie Washington Mitcheson in memory of Robert Stockton Johnson Mitcheson for the Robert Stockton Johnson Mitcheson Collection, R. Nelson

(1741-1827) and members of his artistic dynasty-like family (see Gallery 104, The Lyn and George M. Ross Gallery). Like most painters, the Maryland-born and London-trained Peale developed an identifiable style of representing his sitters, who were mostly wealthy and white and, in general, wanted to convey the message of status and success to their viewers. However Peale revealed his talent in a sympathetic rendering of a sitter who did not dress like or share the experiences of anyone else he had painted: the formerly enslaved African- and Muslim-American Yarrow Mamout (Mamadou Yarrow, c. 1736-1823) of Washington, D.C. Peale, who had manumitted his three enslaved people and came to support abolition, met Mr. Mamout while visiting Washington, D.C. in 1819. He felt a connection with and admired the fortitude of Mr. Mamout. Peale painted him then and brought the completed portrait back to Philadelphia to display in his museum alongside his portraits of other notable men (Figure 8).

Peale is one of many early American artists who created the most personal of portrait types for his clients in the format of a miniature. Painted mostly in watercolor on paper-thin slivers of ivory, miniatures were small portraits intended for one’s personal delight, and they therefore often lack the pretense artists may include in larger format portraits. The presentation is usually what we today would call a “head shot.” Like a favorite photograph, miniatures could be squirreled away and reserved only for private viewing or they could be worn as jewelry (including mourning jewelry), mounted as a pin or hung on a necklace like a watch or fob. (See, for instance Gilbert Stuart, Portrait of Anne Willing Bingham, 1797, in Gallery 105, Flammer Gallery). If the identity of a sitter in a miniature has been lost, clues can be difficult to find since the intended recipient was someone who knew the

3 sitter; for instance, the cabinetmaker Benjamin Randolph (1737-1791, PMA 1990-21-1 in Gallery 103, Leslie Miller and Richard Worley Gallery) by Charles Willson Peale is shown as a nicely dressed man in a powdered wig rather than someone carrying the tools of his trade or standing in front of his iron furnace in New Jersey. Of the sitters whose identities are known, the biographies of the sitters and the artists demonstrate the range of people and experiences that make up our history. Benjamin Clark Cutler (1756-1810) of Massachusetts was a Boston merchant who was painted in about 1794 by Walter Robertson (c. 1750-1802) (Figure 9), a native of Dublin, Ireland who only painted miniatures in the US for four years. He portrayed Mr. Cutler—who was the sheriff of Norfolk County, Massachusetts, from 1798 until he died in 1810—as a man possessing a self-conscious air of accomplishment. Robertson’s style appears to reflect his friendship with Gilbert Stuart, who brought Robertson from Ireland to the United States in 1794. Benjamin Trott (1769-1843) was one of the finest America’s finest and most heralded miniaturists and like many portrait painters, he often led a peripatetic life. Traveling to fulfill commissions in the major cultural centers of the United States, Trott was considered the foremost miniaturist in Philadelphia from 1800 to 1825. Here, Trott has painted the scion of a prominent Philadelphia family, the merchant Samuel Chew Wilcocks (1785-1824) (Figure 10), In 1810, about the year of this portrait, Wilcocks was a man-about-town in Philadelphia—active in the social swirl of up-and-coming prosperous white men who were searching for a suitable wife. In 1816, he married Harriet Manigault (1793-1835), a native of Charleston who each year spent time with relatives in Philadelphia when she was escaping the heat and disease of the South Carolina summer.

Presiding over the loan exhibit with charm and grace are three portraits by known artists of as-yet unnamed sitters whose identities are the source of continued research. The two children standing in front of the flowering rose bushes were painted by Joshua Johnson (c.1763-1830) (Figures 12 and 13), who was born in Baltimore to a white man and an enslaved African mother. His father George Johnson (sometimes Johnston) acknowledged Joshua as his son, purchased him, put him out as an apprentice to a blacksmith, and eventually manumitted him in 1782. Johnson advertised only twice during his fairly lengthy career, describing himself in a newspaper advertisement as, “a self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art, and having experienced many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies.” (The Baltimore Intelligencer, December 12, 1798). He lived in three different locations around the city and supported himself with a full docket of commissions from people who, as recent scholarship has proven, were his neighbors. This Baltimore community, including progressive merchants and artisans who sought a free and equal market and supported abolition, patronized Johnson throughout his life. He painted their portraits as upwardly mobile citizens in the accessible early 19th century limner style. Stylistically, the poses of his sitters, his flattened perspective, and his use of devices places him alongside as well as in competition with the influential members of the Peale family who had established satellite studios and a museum in Baltimore by 1813.

Johnson’s distinctive hand as a portrait painter was first identified by Dr. J. Hall Pleasants (18731957), a Baltimore physician who made a second career for himself as an art historian. Others— including the artist Romare Bearden (1911-1988)—showed interest in Johnson’s paintings, leading to the first solo exhibition of his work in 1987. “Joshua Johnson, Freeman and Early American Portrait Painter” was organized by curators Stiles T. Colwill (Maryland Historical Society) and Carolyn K. Weekley (Colonial Williamsburg Foundation) and shown at the MHS in Baltimore, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Museum in Williamsburg, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and Stamford, Connecticut. In 2021, curator Dennis Fulco mounted “Joshua Johnson: Portraitist of Early American Baltimore” at the Washington County Museum of Fine Arts in Hagerstown, Maryland. (Both exhibitions had accompanying catalogues.)

This pair of portraits of a young boy and girl surfaced only in 2019 from descendants of the sitters (whose exact identities are not confirmed), and they incorporate a readily identifiable set of devices found in other Johnson portraits of children. Children appear in nearly half of Johnson’s work either with their parents or on their own, like this pair are, and they are often set in a garden, holding an object (here a bow and arrow for the boy and some sort of crop for the girl), and gesturing towards a moth. The boy wears a blue suit known as a skeleton suit because it was form fitting and showed off a young lad’s physique. The girl wears a double strand of coral, which was commonly associated with dispelling illness in children; such jewelry is often found in early portraits and repeatedly in Johnson’s. The moth, a symbol of the fleeting nature of childhood, is most likely a Brimstone moth (Opisthograptis luteolata), identifiable by the spots on its vibrantly yellow wings. Brimstone moths appear in gardens nocturnally from April through October, feast on flowers found on shrubs in the rose family (Rosacea including hawthorns and blackthorns) and, like all moths, are drawn towards light—all of which fits in with Johnson’s use of a strong light directed on the young subjects who appear in a garden in front of a flowering bush.

While one can clearly identify the artist’s personal style, Johnson painted the faces of these two children with remarkable deftness. He rendered them as individuals who do not share facial characteristics with others of his sitters, and it is clear they are siblings, if not twins. Their blue eyes are evenly set in their lid sockets and framed by gently arched brows. The relatively long noses tip up at the end to form a distinctive philtrum above the upper lip, and their puffy cheeks and indistinct chin speak to their age.

This most revered portrait by the much heralded artist Ammi Phillips (1788-1865) packs a powerful visual punch not just because of the masterful way he has handled color, but also because of the way he has brought the sitter forward within the composition so that the viewer can absorb and digest the face of the seated woman (Figure 14). Recent research has aligned this painting with identified portraits of a husband and wife from 1833, suggesting that this is quite possibly their daughter Melinda Ann (Arnold) Johnson (1808-1842). That date comports with dress of the sitter: the hairstyle of four bold curls emerging from a lace-lined bonnet, the wide pink ribbons that cinch the bonnet and frame her face as they lay across her front and back, and the low-shouldered dress with the exaggeratedly puffy sleeves of the upper arms and fitted form of the lower arms. Her heart-shaped face—distinguished by gently curved cheeks between a wide forehead and narrowing jawline—is complemented by her deep-set eyes below thick brows, the shock of rouge on her cheeks, and the light that picks out the long philtrum above her neatly pursed lips colored to match her cheeks.

Phillips’ prowess as a colorist shines through in his depiction of her dress, which is made of a material that changes with the light (probably an expensive brushed cotton or shot silk), revealing tones of pink emerging from the layers of green. Former curator and deputy director of the American Folk Art Museum, Stacy C. Hollander, curated a groundbreaking exhibition in 2008 that brilliantly introduced and explored this concept by comparing Phillips’ presentation of color in his compositions to the work of the modernist artist Mark Rothko (1903-1970): “The Seduction of Light: Ammi Phillips and Mark Rothko, Compositions in Pink, Green, and Red.” Phillips’ strong light on the sitter is emphasized by drawing out the pink tones on the arms and body of the dress, creating a swirl of color in the foreground that stands out from his blocks of dark green and pink and reflects the shapes and colors on her face. In a provocative twist, she wears a thin gold chain that is doubled around her neck and clearly carries something that is tucked into her waistband with no indications of what it is. If it is a portrait miniature like that worn by Anne Bingham, the viewer is left with only their imagination as to that person’s identity.

The large, bright, and energetic depiction of Spring Sale at Bendel’s (1921) by New York artist Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944) is chock full of individualized depictions of those taking part in the spring ritual—nearly a sport—of bargain shopping at one of 20th century-New York City’s most iconic events (Figure 15). Each figure is painted as a caricature of a type of fashionable shopper who was most-likely well known to Stettheimer, though not of her socio-economic class. Stettheimer and her sisters Carrie and Ettie were members of an elite Jewish community in New York and were well known for entertaining wonderfully motley combinations of intellectuals, artists, and socialites in their Manhattan apartment. Curtains are drawn on either side that conform to the building’s staircase but frame the scene and give the viewer the sense that they are getting a sneak-peak into this exciting (but chaotic) event. Each of the figures’ faces, stance, and vitality contributes to the energy of the crowd but Stettheimer has also rendered at least one portrait. The founder and owner of the store, the Louisiana born Henri Willis Bendel (1868-1936), is depicted in the foreground at left. For this daytime affair, Bendel dons a debonair tuxedo as he stands sentry, surveying the scene and appearing almost as if he were a circus ringmaster.3 Bendel was a well-known figure in New York City. He had elite taste and was an afficionado of women’s fashion as well as being a designer of millinery and a full range of women’s garments. Bendel was married to Blanche Lehman Bendel (1862-1895), and after her death spent the remaining thirty years living quite publicly with a man named Abraham Beekman Bastedo (1877-1953). When Bendel died, he bequeathed his entire substantial estate to Bastedo, who was described as a faithful employee and aide and eventually became the president of Bendel’s. The two share a grave that is prominently marked with their names and an elaborate sculpture of an angel in Westchester County, New York. Other than Bendel, figures and faces in this crowd are sketches of characters, including the man in the lower right foreground who is a stereotypical representation of what was known then as an “urban fairy.” Stettheimer signed the painting with her initials on a monogrammed sweater worn by the Pekingese dog in the foreground.

The loan exhibit highlights a range of depictions of faces and portraits. We encourage you to savor and enjoy the faces of the many people visiting The Philadelphia Show, find faces in the works of art at The Show and to explore the faces on works of art in the rambling galleries inside the museum now and throughout year.

Florine Stettheimer (1871-1944)

50”h x 40”w

Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Miss Ettie Stettheimer, 1951-27-1

Notes

1 See Jason R. Young, “‘But Oh the Clay is Vile:’ Edgefield Pottery in Life and Death,” in Adrienne Spinozzi, editor, Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina (New Haven: Yale University Press in partnership with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022): 71.

2 See J.R. Young in Spinozzi, 2022, p. 74-75

3 This was an observation by Lily Scott, the Barra Fellow in American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The author thanks Lily for this specifically and generally for assisting her in analyzing the people in this painting.