The Stoddard portraits were acquired in the early 1970s by their last owner, Gerald Kornblau.  They had evidently passed out of the hands of the Stoddard family many years before.  When Kornblau purchased them, there was no information on their provenance.  While Phillips occasionally inscribed the reverse of his portraits with the name of the subject and the date that the portrait was painted, there was no such information on the back of the Stoddard portraits.  The identity of the subjects was completely unknown.

The first clue to the identity of the gentleman in the pair of portraits was the folio of George Washington’s Farewell Address prominently held in his hand.  Kornblau was aware that books or documents appearing in the hands of male subjects depicted in Phillips’s portraits were a device used by the artist to reflect the person’s occupation.  Through diligent research, he discovered that Hudson’s first printer, Ashbel Stoddard, had printed Washington’s address in 1797.  Further research led Kornblau to an etched profile portrait of Ashbel Stoddard illustrated in Columbia County at the Turn of the Century, an early history of the county published in 1900.  A comparison of the printed image with the painted portrait demonstrated distinct similarities between the two figures.  For Kornblau, the identity of the middle-aged man holding Washington’s Farewell Address was confirmed.  A search through the Stoddard family genealogy yielded the name of Stoddard’s wife.

The Stoddard portraits appear to have first been exhibited in 1974 as part of an exhibition of American folk art held at Amherst College in Massachusetts.²⁶  The following year Kornblau displayed the portraits at the Winter Antiques Show in New York.  In 1976, the portraits were included in an exhibition on Ammi Phillips at the Washburn Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York.  The essay in the catalog to the exhibit was written by Mary Childs Black, a noted authority on the work of Phillips.  The portraits were shown a third time in New York City, in 1995, when the Museum of American Folk Art hosted the exhibition Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of American Portraiture.  Finally, the Stoddard portraits were displayed temporarily in 2005 at the Columbia County Historical Society in Kinderhook, New York, not far from where they had been painted almost two centuries before.

¹ For more information on the portraits and career of Ammi Phillips, see Stacy Hollander and Howard P. Fertig, Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of American Portraiture (Museum of American Folk Art, New York, 1994).  See also Mary Black, Barbara C. Holdridge and Lawrence B. Holdridge, Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter, 1788-1865 (Museum of American Folk Art, New York, 1968).

² Mary Black, “Ammi Phillips Portraits Rediscovered,” The Magazine Antiques, September 1987, pp. 558-559.

³ Henry P. Smith, Columbia County at the End of the Century (Hudson, New York, 1900), p. 268.  The year the Stoddards arrived in Hudson is confirmed in an obituary of Ashbel Stoddard published in the Hudson Gazette and reprinted by William Stoddard in the Rural Repository, October 24, 1840, vol. 17, no. 10, p. 79.  According to an obituary in the Columbia Republican, reprinted in the same issue of Rural Repository, “Mr. Stoddard was one of the earliest settlers of this city.”

⁴ Elijah Woodward Stoddard, Anthony Stoddard of Boston, Mass., and His Descendants, 1639-1873, a Genealogy (New York, 1873), p. 232.