Tracking Traveling Artists

Cameron Findlay was the 2021 Warshawsky Fellow in the CMA Collections Management Department where she worked on a long-term loan digitization project. In this essay, Cameron connects her personal interest in research on itinerant artists with skills learned during the summer fellowship.

The work that registrars and collections management staff do is vital to understand the history of artworks and how collection practices have evolved over time.

The main job of a museum registrar is to organize and maintain records for artworks, as well as loans, acquisitions, rights and reproductions, exhibitions, and more. Registrars and other collections staff work with other institutions behind the scenes to keep a museum running smoothly. Their work influences the installation of exhibitions, the acquisition of artworks into the collection, and the facilitation of loans. The CMA Collections Management Department also works closely with staff across the museum. Everyone from curators to shipping agents is directly affected by the work registrars do. If an exhibition were a movie, the curator would be the director, the artwork would be the cast members, and the registrars would be the crew checking lighting, sound, and permits.

When looking through the lens of itinerant art, or art created by people who move from place to place, it is easy to see how important records are to painting the complete picture of an artwork.

Limners. Folk artists. Itinerant painters. Though they are known by many names, these traveling artists are not known by many means. Few records were kept on the pieces they made, and even fewer survive. Folk artists highlight the importance of collections management, and of museum record-keeping as a whole, in preserving the history of their works for generations to come.

Folk artists could travel far to peddle their wares; portraits, sculptures, landscapes, or even sermons were produced in exchange for lodging, food, or money. The CMA has some works by limners in its collection. One example is Virgin and Child by an unknown artist. This sculpture bears the hallmark of Dutch itinerant artists working in French courts, who fused different artistic styles from their travels into their work, creating an unmistakable mark on French religious sculpture in the process.

Chinese artist Xugu, who was both an itinerant artist and priest, combined more than one folk craft. His painting Pipa (Loquats) (枇杷圖) captures the beauty and fragility of nature.

Like Xugu, limner Edward Hicks both painted and preached. His well-known series, The Peaceable Kingdom contains 62 different versions of the same subject, each with a unique flair. His idiosyncratic style and the intrigue surrounding his conflicting views on painting — Hicks was a Quaker — kept him afloat in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War.

These and other itinerant artists were traditionally “unskilled” in their field, as few could afford the luxury of classical training. The pieces, particularly portraits, made by itinerant artists were considered lowbrow art, much like caricatures one would buy today at an amusement park. An example from the CMA’s collection of such a piece is Samuel Cooper’s Portrait of Thomas Hobbes. This painting is a classic itinerant portrait: miniature, portable, and untraditional in execution. The detail on the face — the most important part of the portrait for any client — is precise, while the clothing is little more than a few strokes of watercolor.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has another example of a classic itinerant painting: Mrs. Mayer and Daughter by Ammi Phillips. One of the most famous folk portraitists, Phillips created distinctive work that has been recently catalogued and collected by a few dedicated art historians; you can read more about their project here. As with other folk artists, Phillips’s lack of formal education, combined with the nomadic nature of her craft, has made these pieces more accessible to the general public. Portraits created by limners were a fraction of the price of traditional portraits and were thus more widespread among the middle class.

The speed and accuracy of these portraits was often advertised, with artists promising to redo paintings free of charge if the client was unsatisfied with the sitter’s likeness. Interestingly, these advertisements are often the only paper trail that itinerant artists left behind; their artwork had no formal documentation, such as auction records or provenance paperwork. To make things more complicated, such artists rarely signed their works. Here lies the trouble with tracking down limners: they left little behind to identify themselves.

With few written records, tracing and identifying artworks made by itinerant artists is incredibly difficult. Normally, registrars use documents like bills of sale, auction records, and insurance paperwork to trace ownership and to give a complete record of the artwork for future reference. In this way, collections management and archives staff work toward a common goal: to preserve information for the next generation. For artworks by limners, of course, there is little written information to gather, so research and provenance work must be done in more creative ways.

As mentioned previously, advertisements are often one of the most fruitful sources of information on where, when, and how itinerant artists worked. When advertisements are unavailable, however, other methods can be used. In my own research on a set of itinerant portraits, gathering clues from the paintings’ frames has been invaluable. Old labels and handwritten notes, as well as the material and composition of the frames themselves, can give insight into when and where the paintings were completed.

Another piece of historical context that has helped me date these portraits has been the clothing and hairstyles of the sitters. I can tell, for instance, that certain paintings date from the mid- to late 1800s based on the waistcoat and facial hair of the male portrait alone. One of the trickiest ways to determine the provenance of an itinerant artwork is family or oral history. These portraits were often passed down from generation to generation, with family legend as the only source of information on where they came from. Though often hard to obtain and verify, these types of peripheral information can be used by registrars to supplement the minimal paper record that limners have left behind.

Without records collected and catalogued by registrars, we wouldn’t be able to learn from the past. Our knowledge of Georges Seurat would be as murky as that of Samuel Cooper. The difficulty in tracing the work of limners reveals that with a dearth of information comes a surplus of gratitude for those who keep it.

Cameron Findlay is a rising junior at Smith College majoring in anthropology and minoring in art history and museum studies. During summer 2021, she was the Warshawsky Fellow in Collections Management and worked on a long-term loan digitization project. Aside from filing and organizing, Cameron enjoys cross-stitching, concerts, and taking pictures of her cat, Neffie. After graduation, she hopes to earn a master’s degree in library science to become a librarian or registrar.