Ammi phillips biography of albert

Ammi Phillips painted for more than fifty years, producing perhaps as many as two thousand portraits in so many disparate styles that his works were once thought to be by several different artists.

Currently about five hundred works can be attributed to him, most sharing the characteristics of plain backgrounds, strongly contrasting light and dark elements, and awkwardly articulated figures.

Born in Colebrook, Connecticut, in 1788, Phillips traveled often through western Connecticut and Massachusetts and through New York state.

Advertisements in the Berkshire Reporter indicate that he was offering his services as a professional artist in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, as early as July 1809. His earliest identified works, for example his full-length portraits of Charles Rollin and Pluma Amelia Barstow, painted in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, in 1811, may have been influenced by Connecticut limners active in the late eighteenth century, particularly J.

Brown (active 1806-1808) and Re