"Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter" catalog, letters of praise, 1969

The Holdridges published their premise that Phillips was the Kent Limner and the Border Limner, as well as the artist of additional groups of nineteenth-century portraits, in “Ammi Phillips,” Art in America 48, no. 2 (summer 1960): 98–103. Here they established that the inscription and artist’s signature on the 1840 portrait of George Sunderland was in the style of the Kent Limner, and that the same name was found on early nineteenth-century portraits in the style of the Border Limner. However, it was not until the exhibition Ammi Phillips was presented at the Connecticut Historical Society, in Hartford November 1965 to February 1966, that the artist’s development was visually traced. This was expanded in Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter, 1788–1865, an exhibition presented by the American Folk Art Museum in 1968.

This series contains material related to these essays and exhibitions, as well as the American Folk Art Museum’s 1994 exhibition Revisiting Ammi Phillips.

Source: Stacy C. Hollander, American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with American Folk Art Museum, 2001), 399.