Ammi Phillips ~ Biography & Gallery

Header Painting: Girl in Red Dress with Cat and Dog, 1830-1835 by Ammi Phillips
© The Estate of Ammi Phillips

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Ammi Phillips ~ Biography

Known as: Folk and naïve (primitive) artist
Born: 1788, Colebrook, Connecticut, US
Died: 1865, Massachusetts

Ammi Phillips began his professional career around 1811. He travelled extensively in the New York - Massachusetts - Connecticut border area, and because of this, became known as "Border Limner".

He married Laura Brockway in 1813 and the couple moved to Troy, New York. At some point they moved to Rhinebeck where his wife died in 1830. He remarried shortly after.

Around 1829, he started painting in a new style. The works from this period were from his "Kent Period", named thus because that was the town in Connecticut where the paintings first surfaced. He probaly did the paintings in New York's Duchess Conty.

He returned to western Massachusetts in 1860 where he died five years later.

Ammi Phillips ~ Trivia

Ammi Phillips was known as a "limner". This was the name given to the best-known folk painters of 19th-century America who were nonacademic portrait painters, often itinerant, who usually worked in oils. Primarily, the limner viewed his work as a source of income.

The work from his 1812-1819 period is generally regarded as his first important creative period.

It is probable that Phillips was entirely self-taught.

It was the detective work of Lawrence and Barbara Holdridge, assisted by Mary Black, which traced the career of Ammi Phillips. This team of investigators acquired enough evidence to establish that two seemingly disparate groups of portraits were by Phillips.
Source: The Folk Art Tradition: Naive Painting in Europe and the United States (direct link to book @ amazon.com.

In the years since they were rescued from virtual oblivion, the paintings of Ammi Phillips have achieved an astonishing degree of renown, partly because of their distinctive stylization.
Source: The Folk Art Tradition: Naive Painting in Europe and the United States (direct link to book @ amazon.com.

Phillips in 1820 embarked on a new style which can more readily be associated with his mature period. Already in evidence here are the somber palette, the delight in intricate lacework, and the massing of black forms which set Phillips apart from his contemporaries.
Source: The Folk Art Tradition: Naive Painting in Europe and the United States (direct link to book @ amazon.com.

Releases & Links

Ammi Phillips Gallery here.

Buy Ammi Phillips Treasures

Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter, 1788-1865 [Book, 1969]

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