Nehemiah Partridge

Nehemiah Partridge (March 9, 1683 – between 1729 and 1737) was an American painter. He is believed to be the same artist as those identified as the Schuyler Limner and the Aetatis Suae Limner, though this identification has been called into question by some historians.

Life and career Partridge was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the son of William Partridge and Mary (Brown) Partridge; his father rose from being a carpenter and merchant to become the colony's lieutenant governor from 1696 to 1703, while, in 1705, his sister married Jonathan Belcher, who himself would later become colonial governor. at this time he lived very close to the decorative painter Thomas Child. This changed with the discovery by art historian Mary Black, in the account book of Everett Wendell, of an agreement with Partridge dated May 13, 1718, to trade a horse for ten pounds and four portraits. As a result of this identification, over eighty portraits and one scriptural painting were assigned to Partridge's hand; nearly all are from the Albany area. The discovery was significant for two reasons; it enabled the development of a large body of work for a painter who had previously been known only for his decorative work, and provided another link between painting in the upper Hudson Valley and art in Boston.

Work Certain stylistic hallmarks make Partridge's work easy to distinguish from that of his contemporaries. Chief among them is the fact that nearly all of his paintings are inscribed with the phrase "Aetatis suae" or some variant thereof, followed by the sitter's age and the date of completion of the painting; it was this peculiarity that led to the artist's christening as the "Aetatis Suae Limner", while the epithet "Schuyler Limner" came from the same painter's association with the Schuyler family. Partridge's palette, too, was distinctive, tending towards brown, blue, black, and rust. The figures in his portraits are stiffly formal, typical of many of the untrained American artists following in the footsteps of Godfrey Kneller; many of his paintings derive their compositions from English mezzotints of the era, a practice also typical of many of his contemporaries. Two portraits by the "Schuyler Limner" are owned by the National Gallery of Art, which claims that the creator may not be identical to Partridge; many others are included in the collection of the Albany Institute of History and Art.