In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

43 1835–1865 The Invention of Photography and the Coming of War Itinerant painters, headless bodies, and plain painters Several types of itinerant artists can be identified in Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley by the trails left behind by their works. Seasonal itinerants from the northern Ohio River Valley worked in the deep South during the warmer winter months. Conversely , painters seeking to escape the intense heat of New Orleans pursued work in Kentucky during its more temperate summer, notably the team of Moïse and Fowler. Several well-established artists from northern, urban centers also pursued itinerancies in Cincinnati and Kentucky, drawn either by the potential for wealthy clients, as in the case of G. P. A. Healy, or by a prestigious subject, as in the works of painters who pursued Henry Clay. Some itinerants, such as Horace and Chester Harding, moved to a certain location and stayed for an extended period. Truly wandering artists attracted the attention of prosperous farm families, who hired them to paint several generations during an extended period, as can be seen in the work of Alexander Bradford for the Prewitt family or E. F. Goddard for the Howard family, all in central Kentucky. The itinerant portrait artists who have attained the most mythic status in popular culture, however, were those who worked in several different locations with no obvious pattern of visitation and whose works, far flung and created over a prolonged period of time, varied in achievement and had little stylistic relationship to prevailing trends. Some of these artists plied their trade in remote areas, for clients with lesser means than those in urban and more flourishing rural settings. Reson Crafft and James T. Poindexter may be the most intriguing examples of these itinerants, as their somewhat eccentric approach to pose, anatomical modeling, and costume detail has encouraged an exotic oral tradition: the myth of the headless body. Even now, on tours of historic houses, at meetings of local historical societies, and in reports of works of art by portraitists whose works are scarce, that myth still persists. In these stories one hears of itinerant portrait artists who went from door to door with a well-stocked supply of canvases upon which were painted bodies but not heads. These “head hunters” are imagined to have rendered an open invitation to a willing sitter to have his or her likeness placed atop an existing body. It seems most likely that the headless-body theory sprang from amateur critics of a much later day attempting to explain the disparity 44 lessons in likeness of proportions in some early works. To many eyes accustomed to photographic accuracy, the frequently disproportionate relationship between a carefully rendered visage and an anatomically vague body seems awkward. Arguments against the existence of such canvases and the resulting portraits range from the historical to the technical to the psychological. There is neither literary nor physical evidence to verify the headless-body theory. No advertisements have been found announcing empty spaces above the shoulders for willing sitters. Many artists’ studios were dismantled and inventoried during the early nineteenth century, and in no instance do the inventories or records kept by the artists themselves note the presence of canvases with headless bodies, although canvases with floating heads, many of them well known and devoid of background detail, do exist, notably Gilbert Stuart’s unfinished portraits of George and Martha Washington, now jointly owned by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the National Portrait Gallery. Technically, the addition of a head onto an existing body would have presented several problems. The difference between drying times and medium applications would eventually result in an obvious pentimento (the appearance of earlier brushwork) between the finish of the prototypical body and background and that of the applied head. Gauging the proper proportions between an existing body and an applied head might have been possible for a highly skilled artist with considerable studio experience, but not for the self-taught itinerants. Consider as well marketing factors. Moving about the countryside with prepainted canvases would have required that they be rolled, and thus rather worn upon arrival, making it still more difficult to imagine any potential sitter longing to have his head stuck atop an untidy, alien body. Furthermore, the psychological implications of a sitter consenting to have his or her head placed atop another body is greatly at odds with that mid-nineteenth-century respect for individuality, one of the era’s resounding themes. The...

Share