Joseph H. Davis

Portrait of Sylvanus C. Foss and Mary Jane Foss, 1836, watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper, in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum Joseph H. Davis (active 1832–1837; died May 25, 1865) was an itinerant American portrait painter. Over a period of only five years, from 1832 to 1837, he painted about 150 watercolor portraits of residents of Maine and New Hampshire. The body of work he left behind is highly regarded for its calligraphic line, miniaturizing delicacy, and decorative stylization. His pictures are in many important collections, including those of the American Folk Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art and the Strawbery Banke museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Davis died on May 25, 1865, aged 53, in Woburn, Massachusetts.

Life and work

Personal life

Little is known about the artist's life. However, Davis's signature on his early portraits, many including "Left-handed painter" after his name, helps to demystify some of the anonymity about the painter and his work. The 1926 donation of a signed portrait by an individual donor to the New Hampshire Historical Society led to speculation as to whether he was the Joseph H. Davis of Farmington or Dover, or if he was from Maine instead.

These primary sources also postulate that Davis was probably born on August 10, 1811, in Limington, Maine to land trader Joseph Davis and his wife, Phebe. In addition to farming and land speculating, the elder Davis also worked as a manufacturer and inventor. He lived in several towns in the Northeast, including Saco, Vassalboro, and Newfield, Maine; Morristown, New Jersey; and Wilmington, Massachusetts. He died on May 25, 1865, at the age of fifty-three, in Woburn, Massachusetts. This church provided the network that connected Davis with many of his clients, and Davis includes the church's publications, The Morning Star, as an attribute in many of his portraits.

Artistry Betsey Dowst, 1837, watercolor, pencil, and ink on paper, in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum. Individuals are often displayed alongside prized possessions such as books and pets. Art historians have been able to reconstruct his movements during his brief career as an itinerant artist because of the calligraphic inscriptions Davis would include at the foot of his pictures, usually giving the name and age of his sitters. The sitters are then cross-referenced through external sources, establishing their (and the artist’s) location at the time of the painting. Davis's art has a highly consistent character. He painted portraits in watercolor, with the faces of his sitters depicted in strict profile while their bodies usually open outward to a three-quarter view. As early as 1832, he specialized in recording subjects in interior settings typical of a nineteenth-century rural New England home. The objects portrayed (e.g. musical instruments, inkwells, books, etc.) are used to characterize the subject’s personalities, suggesting their professions and displaying their life styles. Other examples of period-specific furnishing portrayed in Davis’s paintings are the neoclassical Klismos Chair (as seen in the Portrait of Sylvanus C. Foss and Mary Jane Foss, 1836), the banjo clock, and paintings of the family homestead. His work can also be characterized by the painting of multiple members of a single family, either in groups or individually, demonstrating that his reputation spread by word of mouth among the closely tied families of the rural municipalities in which he traveled.

Another distinguishing feature of Davis’s work are the calligraphic ink inscriptions at the bottom of his watercolor portraits. This included their names, year, and the town where they resided. The artist often signed his name to the composition, annotating it with a personal description of himself as a “LEFT HAND / PAINTER.”