Dr. Anne-Imelda Radice, newly appointed Director of the American Folk Art Museum, commented: “This exhibition is fascinating for what it reveals about American art, and even more fascinating for what it reveals about American history.”
An exhibition of drawings and photographs by four 20th century self-taught artists, titled Women’s Studies, and organized by American Folk Art Museum chief curator Stacy C. Hollander, will complement the Prior portraits.
Highlights of Artist & Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed include the artist’s 1843 portraits of William Lawson and Nancy Lawson, which are considered his masterpieces; Three Sisters of the Copeland Family (c. 1854); and a haunting and powerful portrait of William Miller (c. 1849), founder of a millennial
religious group whose beliefs formed the basis of what is now called Adventism. Also included in the exhibition will be books, advertisements, and other documents Prior authored, which provide insight into his career as an artist-businessman, as well as his religious beliefs and social values.
William Matthew Prior: Biography and Background
William Matthew Prior’s paintings have been included in every major early American folk art survey and catalog and are well known to curators, collectors, and scholars. Despite this, questions abound: Was Prior (b. 1806; Bath, ME; d. 1873; East Boston, MA) an academically trained painter who worked in a folk art style? Was he a religious and social activist who painted to subsidize his work in reforming movements? Did he adapt his style of painting for aesthetic or economic reasons? And did his social conscience or business acumen inspire portrait-painting that he made affordable for middle-class patrons?
Prior was exposed to one of America’s more cosmopolitan cultures as a result of living in Bath, Maine (then a shipping and trade capital of the country) and spending time in nearby Portland, which served as the state’s first capital when Maine separated from Massachusetts. There, as elsewhere in the U.S., members of the country’s emerging middle class sought material goods as indicators of their newly achieved social status. Ornamental painters, landscape and portrait artists, cabinetmakers, and other artisans were able to earn income and support families by meeting and satisfying the demands of home and business owners.
Prior began his life as a painter in the early 1820s, when he moved to Portland, Maine, and sought out that city’s foremost house painter, Almery Hamblin. (Hamblin would later become his father-in-law.) He also studied with Charles Codman, the city’s first decorative painter, and many other artists who would affect his career, including, possibly, Gilbert Stuart, the leading portraitist of the day, with whom he may have studied. Advertisements from 1827 reveal Prior’s “sliding [fee] scale” that characterized his work throughout his career: “Persons wishing for a flat Picture can have a Likeness without shade or shadow at quarter price.” (Gilbert Stuart also had a “sliding scale,” but his was based on the size of a work.)
Other advertisements refer to Prior’s work as an ornamental and “fancy” painter.
Examples in the exhibition will include landscapes of Mount Vernon and Washington’s Tomb by Moonlight,, and reverse paintings on glass depicting George and Martha Washington, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln—all symbols of national pride--which he sold for about $8.00 apiece.
In 1831 Prior exhibited a portrait at the esteemed Boston Atheneum. But by 1840 he had settled with his family in East Boston, a working-class neighborhood of artisans and tradesmen, which suited his more commercial approach to painting portraits. He no longer tried to compete with academically trained painters, and sought to avoid the fine art “establishment.” Further, painting was not his only concern.
A religious movement founded by charismatic preacher William Miller was sweeping the nation and Prior had become an avid follower. He was commissioned by Miller’s close associates to create images of the preacher and thereby help promote the religious campaign. Miller had studied the bible exhaustively and devised a complex theory of the second coming of Jesus Christ; he also predicted the end of the world, targeting sometime between 1843 and 1844. When the prophecy proved false, Prior remained faithful to Millerism (despite a schism in the movement) but turned his attention to expanding his business.
In East Boston Prior created what he called his “painting garrett” and from the 1840s through the 1850s, he painted some of his best-known and most-prized portraits, especially those of children. When a new medium for “likenesses” began and grew in popularity—the daguerreotype—Prior adjusted his style of portraiture, adding color and more detail. He also began to engage in what he called “spirit-effect” portraits, which he marketed to parents of deceased children. Prior may have been drawn to Spiritualism, which professed communication with the dead. By that time, the artist had lost many family members: his parents, brother, first wife, and six children. His second wife promoted herself as a clairvoyant and they may have met through an interest in spirit life.
Racism prevailed in all levels of American society at the time, even in the North and even in Boston, the epicenter of the abolitionist movement in New England. Prior’s writings of the 1860s reveal his abolitionist stance and religious conviction that slavery was abhorrent. “Skin may differ; but affection dwells in white and black just the same. There is [no] justice in . . . slavery . . . being inconsistent with God’s government and inconsistent with our declaration and constitution as a nation.” (From The Empyrean Canopy, a book of beliefs, opinions, and ideals written by Prior in 1868.) Prior’s signature on his paintings of African Americans was both an artistic statement and an expression of his moral values.
William Matthew Prior developed an extended circle of fellow artists, most of whom were related through marriage. Known as the “Prior-Hamblin School,” Sturtevant J. Hamblin (1816–1884), George G. Hartwell (1815–1901), and William W. Kennedy (1818–after 1880), among others, all created works of art that display Prior’s influence. William Matthew Prior died of typhoid fever in January, 1873, at age 66. Though he had ventured only briefly into the formal art world, Prior’s influence on the history of American portraiture was profound and long lasting.
Exhibition Funding and Other Credits
The Henry Luce Foundation, as the foundation sponsor, provided partial funding for the exhibition and catalog “Artist & Visionary: William Matthew Prior Revealed.” Funding is also provided by the American Folk Art Society and the Beryl P. Haas Charitable Remainder Unitrust.
The presentation at the American Folk Art Museum is sponsored, in part, by Joyce Berger Cowin, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the David Davies and Jack Weeden Fund for Exhibitions.
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