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Henrietta Dorr

Ammi Phillips, 1788–1865; born Colebrook, CT; died Curtisville, MA

y1958-66

Henrietta Dorr was about six when her father, Dr. Russell Dorr of Chatham, New York, commissioned itinerant artist Ammi Phillips to paint individual portraits of his family. Remarkably, all eight works survive, grouped in pairs of diminishing size by the sitters’ ages, with those of Henrietta and her youngest brother, Robert, being the smallest. Phillips rendered the Door family in what is known as his “Border” style, referring to a period from 1813–19 when the artist depicted residents from towns along the intersecting New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut state lines. Flat, starkly modeled, with simple compositions, these works are also delicate and fresh, contrasting markedly with Phillips’s later work in which a decorative and formulaic stylization predominates. One of several portraits by the artist in the Museum’s esteemed Balken collection of American Folk Art, Henrietta Dorr is both its most penetrating and its most endearing.

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Handbook Entry

Henrietta Dorr was about six when her father, Dr. Russell Dorr of Chatham, New York, commissioned itinerant artist Ammi Phillips to paint individual portraits of his family. Remarkably, all eight works survive, grouped in pairs of diminishing size by the sitters’ ages, with those of Henrietta and her younger brother, Robert, being the smallest. Phillips rendered the Dorr family in what is known as his "Border" style, referring to images dating from 1813–19, when the artist depicted residents from towns along the intersecting New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut state lines. Flat, starkly modeled, and simple compositions, but also delicate and fresh, they contrast markedly with Phillips’s later work, where a decorative and formulaic stylization predominates. One of several portraits by the artist in the Museum’s esteemed Balken collection of American folk art, Henrietta Dorr is both its most penetrating and its most endearing.

Information

Object Number

y1958-66

Maker

Ammi Phillips

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dates

ca. 1814

Dimensions

56 x 45 cm. (22 1/16 x 17 11/16 in.) frame: 64.7 × 54 × 5 cm (25 1/2 × 21 1/4 × 1 15/16 in.)

Credit Line

Gift of Edward Duff Balken, Class of 1897

Type

oil paintings, paintings

Subject

portraits, red, figures (representations), brown, flowers (plants), flowers (plants), blue, gray (color), child, girl

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/85180914

American provincial paintings, 1790-1877: from the collection of Edward Duff Balken: galleries E and F, January 9 through February 23, 1947, (Pittsburgh, PA: Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, 1947)., no. 30

3347 1947

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/3131914

American folk art: a collection of paintings presented in 1958 by Edward Duff Balken of the Class of 1897 to the Art Museum, Princeton University, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 1958)., no. 52

3349 1958

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3774388

"Recent Acquisitions," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 18, no. 1 (1959): p. 40-42., p. 40

876 1959

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/874253193

Colleen Cowles Heslip, Between the rivers: itinerant painters from the Connecticut to the Hudson, (Williamstown, MA: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 1990)., p. 56-57, no. 16

3357 1990

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3774772

Charlotte Eman Moore, "Another generation's Folk Art: Edward Duff Balken and his collection of American Provincial paintings and drawings", in "A Window into Collecting American Folk Art: The Edward Duff Balken Collection at Princeton," special issue, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 57, no. 1/2 (1998): p. 10-28., p. 20, fig. 14

3045 1998

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3774773

"Another generation's folk art: Edward Duff Balken and his collection of American provincial paintings and drawings: appendix I: an inventory of works from the home of Edward Duff Balken", special issue, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 57, no. 1/2 (1998): p. 29-30., p. 30

3046 1998

https://www.jstor.org/stable/3774774

Colleen Cowles Heslip and Charlotte Emans Moore, "Catalogue of the collection," in "A window into collecting American folk art: the Edward Duff Balken Collection at Princeton," special issue, Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University, 57, no. 1/2 (1998): p. 31-162., p. 132-134; cat. no. 50

3047 1998

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/191864564

Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 207 (illus.)

474 2007

http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/865020505

Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 205

1994 2013