On view
Wilmerding Pavilion
Philip & Nancy Anschutz Gallery
Henrietta Dorr,
ca. 1814
More Context
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, <em>Henrietta Dorr</em> is both its most penetrating and its most endearing.
Information
ca. 1814
North America, United States
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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).
, cat. no. 21 -
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. 21 - "Recent Acquisitions," Record of the Art Museum, Princeton University 18, no. 1 (1959): p. 40-42., p. 41
- 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
- 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
- "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. 29
- 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. 151–153; cat. no. 60
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 263 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 315
