Jacob Wessel Ten Broeck and William Henry Ten Broeck
Contents
Jacob Wessel Ten Broeck
William Henry Ten Broeck
Portrait
Description from the auction catalog, Skinner, Boston, March 3, 2013 10:00AM "Ammi Phillips (American, 1788-1865)"
Double Portrait of the Ten Broeck Twins, Jacob Wessel Ten Broeck (1823-1896) and William Henry Ten Broeck (1823-1888), Aged 10 Years, Seated with a Bowl of Fruit, Clairmont, Columbia County, New York, 1834. Unsigned, the names and ages of the sitters and the date of the painting inscribed in Ammi Phillips's hand on the back of the canvas. Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 50 1/4 in., in a period painted wood frame with foliate gesso applications on the corners. Condition: Relined, very minor retouch.
Exhibitions: Ammi Phillips in Columbia County, the Columbia County Historical Society, Kinderhook, New York, August 15 to September 30, 1975, illustrated in the exhibition catalog on the cover and on p. 36, and discussed on p. 33; American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, February 26 to May 13, 1980, the portrait illustrated in the exhibition catalog/reference book with the same title, p. 144; Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of American Portraiture, Museum of American Folk Art, New York, February 5, 1984 to December 1994, illustrated in the exhibition catalog p. 46, and discussed pp. 55-6.
Note: Shrouded in mystery for many years, Ammi Phillips' portraits have been eagerly studied by scholars and avidly collected both by institutions and individuals. His work has consistently been recognized as the most important among nineteenth century American folk art portraits and has held the interest of the art world for decades.
Phillips' output began to emerge in the early twentieth century first as the work of as many as three separate artists, A. Phillips, the Border Limner, and the Kent Limner. Through careful work from scholars over many years, Phillips' life story and oeuvre began to emerge, and it became clear that the three artists were actually a single painter whose skill developed over a period of decades. Moving through communities and styles, Ammi Phillips was an extremely adaptable and successful portrait painter whose work continues to beguile and fascinate folk art enthusiasts today.
During his fifty year career, Phillips lived in a handful of different towns, counties, and even states, all centering around Columbia County, New York. Though he moved with greater frequency than his neighbors, he put down remarkably deep roots for a so-called itinerant artist. In fact, he seems to have made a fairly good living from his work, which was exclusively portrait painting by commission. Observing his success, artist John Vanderlyn commended Phillips' career to his nephew, advising him that seeking a similar career would provide a solid path toward material stability and good social standing. Vanderlyn pointed out in a letter to his nephew that country portrait painters like Phillips could "gain more money than you could by any mechanical business," and indeed, more than Vanderlyn himself earned during periods in which the academic painter had trouble obtaining patronage for his more complex and costly works. Wherever Phillips moved, he had sufficient means to buy and sell property and was received as a solid member of each community in which he lived and worked.
Along with his willingness to undertake life in a new place, Phillips also proved highly adaptable in his work. Moving through periods of formulaic portraits and experimental compositions, the artist settled into a particularly confident and spare style by the time he painted several members of the Ten Broeck family in the early 1830s. Many scholars have observed the confidence and control that distinguish work from Phillips' Kent period (so named for his move to Kent, Connecticut), including his portrait of the Ten Broeck twins and a contemporaneous portrait of an unknown child in a pink dress, which appears as the next lot in this sale. In contrast to his earliest portraits, which are almost dreamlike in their rendering and detail, these works display a great solidity of shape and color. There is drama in the dark backgrounds that Phillips chose, backgrounds which supplanted more elaborate settings used by his contemporaries and drew strong, immediate focus to sitters' faces.
In the Ten Broeck twins' portrait, the viewer's eye runs first to the boys' faces, framed by bright white collars that contrast starkly with the black background and the boys' dark brown jackets. The pink of their cheeks echoes the blush of the peaches that sit in a bowl between the two boys and in one twin's hand. A reference to the orchard in Clermont, New York, where the boys grew up, the peaches and pears that sit in a white bowl on a dark table provide a secondary point of focus that allows Phillips to negotiate the negative space between his two sitters. That the boys are identical twins is obvious; however, the artist shows his great skill in subtly differentiating their faces. As the viewer looks from one to the other, it becomes evident that Phillips took no shortcuts in rendering his two subjects in a precise and lifelike manner. Double portraits in Phillips' hand are very rare, and his portrait of the Ten Broeck twins distinguishes itself as one of the most memorable and stunning of his output.
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Top seller at Skinner’s auction of the late Andy Williams’s folk art collection was Ammi Phillips’s double portrait of the Ten Broeck twins, Jacob Wessel and William Henry, that sold for $750,000 against a $300,000-$500,000 estimate. Late-19th-century molded painted copper leaping stag weather vane by Cushing & White of Waltham went for $13,000 (against a $5,000-$7,000 estimate). James Bard’s portrait of the side-wheeler steamboat Neversink brought $90,000 (against $50,000-$75,000). “Circle,” an acrylic on canvas of brilliantly colored concentric circles by Kenneth Noland (1924-2010) is from Williams’s collection of postwar and contemporary art to be auctioned May 15-16 by Christie’s. The painting’s estimate is $900,000-$1.2 million. Below: Highlighting the impressionist and modern art from Williams’s collection to be auctioned by Christie’s on May 8-9 is “Composition,” Pablo Picasso’s 1927 oil on canvas of a surrealistic feminine figure ($800,000-
$1.2 million estimate). This first-phase chief’s wearing blanket, the rarest type of Navajo blanket, is expected to bring $200,000-$300,000 at Sotheby’s May 21 auction of Williams’s Navajo blanket collection.SKINNER INC.
“Throughout my life I have always been collecting. Every picture I ever sold I still regret. But I never gave up buying. I could not imagine a life without paintings.”
Those were the words of Andy Williams discussing his love of art.
The legendary entertainer, who died last September at 84, said his first interest was French Impressionist painting, but that was early in his career, when he was in his 20s and “I didn’t have any money.”
All he could afford were two dollar prints, he said, “but when I made a little bit of money, then I started buying lithographs for $75.”
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It wasn’t until the early 1960s, after nearly a decade of successful records, including his signature “Moon River,” that Williams was able to buy paintings. They grew in number to become a vast collection housed in his California and Branson, Mo., homes and at his Moon River Theater at Branson, and now up for auction at sales in this country and Europe.
Get The Weekender in your inbox The Globe's top picks for what to see and do each weekend, in Boston and beyond. Enter your email address Sign Up The first of the sales was his folk art collection that sold last month at Skinner’s American Furniture & Decorative Arts Auction for $2,074,250.
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The top seller was the 1834 double portrait of the 10-year-old Ten Broeck twins, Jacob Wessel and William Henry, of Clermont, N.Y., painted by the Connecticut-born folk artist Ammi Phillips. It sold for $750,000 against a $300,000- $500,000 estimate.
It was followed by the $400,000 paid for an unsigned 19th-century still life of fruit and flowers, possibly by Joseph Proctor, a little-known African-American artist, and the $325,000 paid for a racetrack tout tobacconist figure, possibly carved by Charles Dowler of Providence. Each had a $150,000-$250,000 estimate.
An 1830 Phillips portrait of a young boy in a pink dress pictured with a spaniel sold for $120,000 against a $200,000-$300,000 estimate, while a pair of early-20th-century widgeon decoys by the Ward brothers, Lemuel and Stephen, of Crisfield, Md., went for $110,000, more than five times the low of the $20,000-$30,000 estimate.
The 1866 portrait of the side-wheeler steamboat Neversink by the New York marine artist James Bard brought $90,000 (estimate was $50,000–$75,000) and a circa 1880 view of the buildings and surroundings of the Berks County almshouse in Reading, Pa., painted by John Rasmussen, a German émigré, fetched $85,000 (estimate $100,000-$150,000).
The collection’s 12 weather vanes were topped by a late-19th-century gilt molded copper and cast zinc pig vane that brought $30,000 against a $15,000–$25,000 estimate.
All of the collection’s 22 lots sold except for a circa 1860 horse weather vane by J. Howard & Co., of West Bridgewater (estimate $15,000–$25,000), and a 19th-century portrait of a woman attributed to the Leverett-born folk artist Erastus Salisbury Field (estimate $2,500-$3,500).
Andy Williams’s collection of postwar and contemporary art, Impressionist and modern art, American and Latin American art will be auctioned by Christie’s in a series of sales in May followed in June by the sale of his African art in Paris.
The large group of postwar and contemporary works to be sold in New York on May 15-16 is expected to bring in excess of $30 million and will be followed by the sale of additional postwar and contemporary works in London on June 25-26.
