Lot 2014: Robert Deacon Peckham American, 1785-1877 Portrait of Betsey Baker Thurston Davis, 1819

Robert Deacon Peckham
American, 1785-1877
Portrait of Betsey Baker Thurston Davis, 1819
Oil on panel
26 3/4 x 22 1/2 inches

Provenance:
Helen B. Ihnen, Rutherford, NJ
Christie's New York, American, Furniture, Silver, Folk Art and Decorative Arts, Tuesday, June 25, 1991, lot 123

Literature:
John Davis Estabrook, Three Generations of Northboro Davises, 1781-1894. Westboro, Mass.: The Chronotype Printing Company, 1908, rep. p. 21
Helen B. Ihnen, "Search and Research," The Antiques Journal, March 1951, pp. 18, 20, rep. p. 18.

Born in 1763, Betsey Baker Thurston married as her third husband Deacon Isaac Davis of Northboro, Massachusetts. Three years later, in 1819, Deacon Davis commissioned Robert Peckham, a resident of nearby Westminster, to paint their likenesses. According to family tradition, Peckham painted several members of the Davis family. Wearing a demure bonnet, a beaded necklace and a long-sleeved Empire dress decorated with a fashionably high frilled neck, Mrs. David is attired in the present work in a style appropriate to the period.

By the mid-twentieth century, the portrait had passed out of family hands. Helen B. Ihnen, who purchased the portrait of Mrs. Davis at an antique shop in New York City, wrote of her acquisition and her efforts to research the painting in an article in The Antiques Journal in March 1951. A scrapbook of Mrs. Ihnen's research and correspondence concerning the portrait and Davis family genealogy accompanies the lot. In her article, Mrs. Ihnen describes an old bill in the Davis family records, reading:

Dea. Isaac Dayas
To Robert Peckham, Dr.
1815, April 15
To painting to portraits
$24.00

Received payment
Robert Peckham

A Massachusetts portrait painter, Robert Peckham was active in the country districts of New England, but also spent time in Boston and Northampton after his marriage. By 1821 he had settled in Westminster, where he established a reputation for portrait painting. His portrait of John Greenleaf Whittier is owned by the Worcester Historical Association; other examples of his work are included in the collections of the Fruitlands Museum, Harvard, Massachusetts; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Deacon Robert was also an abolitionist and his home was a stop on the Underground Railroad.