Lot 627: * J.H. (JOSEPH H.) DAVIS (FL. CA. 1832-1837)

inscribed Joseph W. Lowell the age of 19. 1836. Painted at Strafford Ridge. March 1836; in the original black-painted frame.

watercolor, pen and ink on paper

9 1/2 by 8 1/2 in. 24.1 by 21.6cm

Fred Giampietro, New Haven, Connecticut

Joseph Lowell, the son of Jonathan and Mary (Pierce) Lowell, was born December 5, 1816 in Standish, Cumberland Maine; he married Cordelia Llewellyn of Standish about 1837.

Charlotte Emans Moore, writing in American Radiance, noted that "During the mid-1830s, J.H. Davis executed more than 150 watercolor likenesses of residents of southwestern Maine and southeastern New Hampshire...[specializing] in recording them in interior settings typical of nineteenth-century middle-class parlors. Individuals are seated on ornately grain-painted chairs positioned beside elaborately-decorated tables where they read, write, attend to their children or pets, or pursue other commonplace activities. The tables bear flower arrangements, bowls of fruit, books, quill pens and inkwells, beaverskin hats. The parlor walls are decorated with banjo clocks, maps and pictures wrapped in swags of greenery, that depict family homesteads or other picturesque scenery. Extraordinary, colorful carpets appear across the bottom of the compositions.

Among the most distinguishing features of Davis' work are elaborate calligraphic inscriptions found at the bottom of the watercolors which pertain to the sitters, including their names, ages at the time their likenesses were made, and the towns they lived in. In at least one instance the artist signed his name to a painting, annotating it with a personal inscription of himself as a LEFT HAND / PAINTER.

Researchers Sybil and Arthur Kern have done research into primary sources across the Northeast, and have formed a compelling biography for this man whose identity has beeen defined principally from the works of art he left behind. They propose that he was probably born on August 10, 1811, in Limington, Maine, the son of land trader Joseph Davis and his wife, Phebe. In addition to farming and land spceulating like his father, over the years this individual also worked as a manufacturer and an inventor. He lived in several towns in the Northeast, including Saco, Vassalboro and Newfield, Maine, Morrison, New Jersy, and Wilmington, Massachusetts. He died on May 25, 1864, at the age of fifty-three, in Woburn, Massachusetts."

Accompanying this lot is some brief genealogical information on Lowell's family.