The regularity with which the Beardsley portraits have been investigated since the 1950s is a striking testament to their durability and versatility. As the tools and questions of art history have evolved over the decades, the Beardsleys have continued to offer new prospects, and the promise of their future study remains bright. Each new interpretive method applied to the Beardsley portraits has contributed to our understanding of both the artist and the sitters and kept pace with the wider field of American folk art. A survey of the major studies of the Beardsley portraits provides a sense of the arc of their appreciation and lays the foundation for a new generation of scholarship.

Just a year after the Beardsley portraits were donated to the Yale University Art Gallery in 1952 by Gwendolen Jones Giddings, who had received them by indirect family descent, they were first published in the Connecticut State Medical Journal, a reflection of their donor’s initial offer of the paintings to Yale Medical School’s library as depictions of one of New Haven’s earliest physicians and his wife.3 The article, “Portraits of Doctor Hezekiah Beardsley and His Wife, Elizabeth,” was written by the university’s medical librarian, Frederick G. Kilgour, who understandably concentrated on Dr. Beardsley’s professional biography and wrote little about the portraits as artworks beyond a summary description of them as “good examples of the so-called school of American primitive painting.”4

Kilgour recalled Dr. Beardsley’s work in pediatric medicine, including a lecture for the recently founded Medical Society of New Haven County in April 1788, later published, on a fatal “Case of a Schirrus in the Pylorus of an Infant” who had been his patient in Southington, Connecticut. The child was unable to digest food properly, and Dr. Beardsley’s autopsy revealed the cause as a hardening of the opening between the child’s stomach and her intestine, now known as pyloric stenosis. Kilgour observed that Dr. Beardsley was not the first to discover the condition, which had been identified in earlier publications in Europe, but that he likely recognized it independently and was the first to describe it in America, which he did with remarkable accuracy and detail despite his lack of academic medical training. Kilgour credited the “high level of medical practise [sic] in Connecticut in the last half of the eighteenth century,” which Dr. Beardsley represented, as the basis for the later creation of the Yale School of Medicine, in 1810, a community of physicians “anxious to maintain and increase the proud traditions of their profession.”5 To Kilgour, the interest of the Beardsley portraits was in the perspective they offered into the culture of early medicine. Viewed in that light, it seems peculiar that Hezekiah is not depicted as a practicing physician or an apothecary, but at leisure, reading Gibbon.

The first characterization of the Beardsley Limner came in Nina Fletcher Little’s 1957 introduction to Little-Known Connecticut Artists, 1790–1810, published as a special issue of the Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin to accompany an exhibition of the same title held at the historical society during the ensuing winter.6 As Little’s title suggests, her goal was “to invite critical comment, add information, and stimulate interest” in the group of artists she drew together, most of whom remained anonymous.7 Of special note were two unknown painters of large portrait pairs—the Beardsley and Eldredge Limners—whose work justified the project in Little’s eyes, and who, she concluded, “are worthy of a high place in American provincial art.”8 The Eldredge Limner’s prominent, full-length 1795 portraits of James and Lucy Gallup Eldredge of Brooklyn, Connecticut (Figs. 3, 4), share a sense of concept and ambition with the Beardsley portraits. The Eldredge portraits were donated to the Connecticut Historical Society and later attributed to John Brewster, Jr. (1766–1854), whose early work, like the Beardsley Limner’s, demonstrates a strong influence of the work of Ralph Earl (1751–1801), who had been active in New Haven in the mid-1770s.

Little’s essay attributed six paintings to the Beardsley Limner and relied on them to describe the artist’s work as “outstanding for his use of color and for the clarity of his architectural backgrounds.”9 Little provided few specifics to link the paintings of “this distinguished group,” of which four depict children—Charles and Joseph Wheeler and an unknown girl (possibly another Wheeler, the boys’ older sister, Sally) and a third boy. The Beardsleys are the only adults in the group, whose portraits Little connected with those of the children for similarities in “pose, contour of face . . . oddly highlighted hair, and the manner of painting costumes and accessories.”10 Little’s project was, as she described, an opening. Her work provided a starting point for two important rounds of later research and preliminary criteria for further attributions.

The most intensive study of the Beardsley Limner was associated with the 1972 exhibition The Beardsley Limner and Some Contemporaries: Postrevolutionary Portraiture in New England, 1785–1805, organized by Christine Skeeles Schloss, then a graduate student at Yale, and Tom Armstrong of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection in Williamsburg, Virginia, and accompanied by a catalog that Schloss authored.11 Schloss and Armstrong convened the fourteen paintings then attributed to the Beardsley Limner and placed them in the context of the artist’s New England contemporaries, including both Earl and Brewster. According to director Graham Hood’s introduction to the catalog, the project was intended to initiate a series of exhibitions that would explore regional American folk art traditions, identify individual artists, and evaluate folk art’s quality.

Schloss set the Beardsley Limner into a social and historical context, particularly the revival of middle-class portraiture in the aftermath of the American Revolution. She set Earl and Winthrop Chandler (1747–1790) as the benchmarks of practice in Connecticut and Massachusetts for artists like the Beardsley Limner. Building on Little’s research, Schloss sought to identify and enumerate more fully the signature characteristics of the Beardsley Limner’s “formula,” including the consistent three-quarter view of his sitters’ faces; the regular shape of his sitters’ cheeks, noses, and upper lips; and “the symmetrical, almond-shaped eye” that she found their “most striking and characteristic feature.” She also described the awkward depiction of volume in the sitters’ clothing and bodies, their distinctive position in space, as well as their “gracefully proportioned hands.”12

Schloss initiated a chronological record of the lives of the artist’s known sitters to describe the artist’s practice through time. She added connective links to contemporaries, notably Christian Gullager (1759–1825), who painted a portrait of Dorothy Lynde Dix, mother of at least three, and possibly four, of the Beardsley Limner’s sitters, which enabled Schloss to contextualize the artist’s multiple influences.13 The exhibition included works by ten of the Beardsley Limner’s contemporaries in order to foreground the presence of informal education in the study of other artists’ works by self-taught painters like the Beardsley Limner.

In an article for The Magazine Antiques in 1984, Colleen Heslip and Helen Kellogg collaborated on the first effort to associate an individual—Connecticut pastellist Sarah Perkins (1771–1831)—with the artist identified up to this point only as the Beardsley Limner. Comparing both style and social network, Heslip and Kellogg made the case for linking the two artists’ work across media—pastel drawings by Perkins and the Beardsley Limner’s work in oil paint—on the evidence of the Perkins family’s educational ties to Yale and professional associations in the field of medicine, vehicles for recruiting her commissions. Although Perkins lived in Plainfield, Connecticut, near the eastern edge of the state, her relatives, including four of her five brothers, attended Yale, which may have brought her to New Haven and into the Beardsleys’ acquaintance. Perkins’s father, Elisha Douglas, was also a prominent physician, as were a number of other male relatives, and he traveled often to promote medical tools of his invention, which may have introduced him to the Beardsleys. The article relies on speculative links—the possibility that Perkins’s father arranged commissions while on his travels or that children from distant parts of New England attended her neighboring Plainfield Academy—to make a circumstantial case for Perkins’s access to the sitters in the Beardsley Limner’s portraits.14

Stylistically, the authors cited Schloss’s work as the basis for their study of the Beardsley Limner, beginning with the almond-shaped eyes and including her general list of signature stylistic criteria, to which they added the graduated lighting across the backdrops of the portraits, as well as recurring qualities in the sitters’ hairstyles and clothing.15 Perkins’s rediscovery had followed a similar trajectory to the Beardsley Limner’s from the 1950s on, and the authors relied on the foundational work of William Lamson Warren for their study of Perkins.16 The stylistic association of the two artists’ works relied on broad assumptions, including a “similar level of maturity” in Perkins’s pastels around 1789 and the Beardsley portraits, although this would have an eighteen-year-old Perkins, near the beginning of her career, creating the Beardsley portraits.17 A comparison of Perkins’s portrait of Alpheus Hatch (Fig. 5) with that of Hezekiah Beardsley suggests a considerable contrast in effort and ability, while an indifference to color in the former work is at odds with that distinguishing attribute of the Beardsley Limner. Hatch’s clothes seem to peel back to parallel the picture plane and expand the mass of his chest to fill space, whereas Dr. Beardsley’s jacket moves in gracious undulations, and his body seems to retreat from the picture plane.

The attribution of the Beardsley Limner’s works to Perkins has not been widely adopted by museums. In her catalog of American folk art in the collection of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Deborah Chotner concluded that “while some stylistic similarities exist between the two, there are sufficient differences to raise questions about this identification.”18 Nevertheless, the comparative study of Perkins’s work and life experience with the Beardsley Limner’s milieu is illuminating and offers a productive record of the kind of network of relationships that the Beardsley Limner may have shared.

In the most recent study of the Beardsley paintings, in 2008, Robin Jaffee Frank highlighted the vibrant intellectual and devotional world of the sitters and the dynamics of their marriage as recorded in the respective readings shown in the paintings.19 Frank newly identified the book in Elizabeth’s hand as James Hervey’s two-volume Meditations and Contemplations (1746), which was recorded in their library in Hezekiah’s estate inventory of 1790. The book is shown open to the chapter “Reflections on a Flower-Garden,” a direct reference to the subject shown outside her window and a metaphor for the spiritual order, modesty, and consideration of salvation New Light Calvinists like Hervey espoused for women.20 In Frank’s view, the portraits depict the sitters’ inner lives and their life together, as two people contemplating their own mortality as well as the future of their young nation, highlighted by Hezekiah’s volumes of Gibbon. The portraits’ sensitivity to the Beardsleys’ spiritual life has opened a promising new avenue of investigation.

Early discussion of the Beardsley Limner focused on discerning the artist’s work, separating it from that of other artists in New England during the same period. The primary metric for attribution was comparison with the Beardsley portraits themselves; they set the standard. The two paintings suggested the integrity of vision of a distinct maker and a quality of work worth knowing more about.

As time passed and research continued, other artworks came into view that shared characteristics either with the Beardsleys or with the four other paintings that Nina Little first identified. But the attributes used to evaluate newer arrivals were broad, especially those related to infelicities of volume and space that are common in folk art. Connecticut painters were naturally influenced by the same constellation of nearby peers whose works they had access to for study and emulation, and they portray sitters in the fashion of clothing and hairstyle of their shared moment.21 These cannot be the basis for attribution.

Because no other painting currently attributed to the Beardsley Limner approaches the Beardsley portraits in quality, complexity, or significance, the artist’s identification with the paintings remains critical—anything attributed to the artist must connect with the project that produced these two paintings. Frank’s research has unveiled layers of intellectual and religious character that visual description—three-quarter pose, almond-shaped eyes, and so forth—does not capture. If made by the same person, other works must share the Beardsley portraits’ intelligence and worldview and demonstrate the Beardsley Limner’s habitual practices.

Since the late nineteenth century, connoisseurship has been defined by the work of the Italian critic Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891), to whom insignificant details, rather than practiced ones, uniquely revealed the presence of the artist’s hand, because they illustrate idiosyncrasy. Morelli offered a vehicle for attribution that has proven a lasting paradigm, in which, as summarized by Edgar Wind, “an artist’s personal instinct for form will appear at its purest in the least significant parts of his work because they are the least labored.”22 Morelli found that the studio devices of composition, proportion, color, expression, and gesture are most often manifested through ingrained repetition of training or imitation, whereas in details—an earlobe or a fingernail—the artist reveals personal solutions.23 In these nuances, alongside the Beardsley portraits’ visual intelligence, the artist can be recognized.

Comparison of Elizabeth Beardsley’s portrait with the portrait of Harmony Child Wight (Fig. 6), for example, offers a starting point for a different order of discussion around attribution. The translucency of Wight’s collar and the fringe of her bonnet as well as the treatment of the movement and wisp-like ends of her hair resonate with Elizabeth’s portrait. Likewise, the angled curtain behind Wight, which reveals the distant landscape and parallels the front edge of the bonnet that exposes her face, creates an analogy of the portrait as a window into the sitter’s character. The style of the two paintings is not identical, as Wight’s is more freely painted and suggestive in its characterization of the sitter, but they share the attributes that Little and Schloss—who first attributed the Wight portrait—acknowledged, as well as a degree of metaphorical imagination not found in many of the works attributed to the Beardsley Limner.24

Aspects of the Beardsley portraits define the criteria for other works securely sharing their attribution. Other works should not be associated with the artist’s aesthetic and stylistic practices without conditional phrasing. Tightening the frame around the artist’s central practice enables meaningful consideration of variation between sitters and over time. Rather than a spiraling dilution of identity, the process becomes more deliberate, conscious, and purposeful when the core group of works remains clear. Placed at the center, the Beardsley portraits find more interest and relevance than they do in relation to works marginally attributed to the artist.

By these criteria, the Beardsley portraits share more in character and aspiration with the paintings of Earl, especially his early portrait of Roger Sherman (Fig. 7), from around 1775, also painted in New Haven, where Sherman lived and served both as treasurer of Yale and as a representative to the Continental Congress. Sherman’s dour character is remarkably encapsulated by this idiosyncratic portrait, which the neighboring Beardsleys and the artist who painted them must have known. The severity of Earl’s portrait—his focus on facial expression, limited palette, and striking sense of likeness, including the awkward peculiarities of the seated figure’s arrangement in space—connect with the portrait of Hezekiah in particular. The Sherman portrait is Beardsley’s neighbor in every sense, down to his green Windsor chair. Likewise, there are revealing echoes of the portrait of Elizabeth in Connecticut artist Winthrop Chandler’s striking contemporary portrait of Anna Paine Chandler (Fig. 8), the artist’s sister-in-law, from around 1780. The painting’s crisp, austere representation of Chandler’s face resembles Elizabeth’s in essential ways, both in their insistent clarity of likeness and their balance with the decorative flourishes in their surrounding space. However, Elizabeth preserves a symmetry with the interior in which her husband appears, while Chandler’s drapes have a life of their own. These comparisons to works by other artists benefit understanding of the Beardsley portraits more than comparison to the paintings less securely attached to the same artist.

The Beardsley portraits invite further research in ways that have only been recently revealed. Frank’s discovery of the Hervey book in Elizabeth’s portrait has added dimension to the paintings’ portrayal of the sitters’ appearances by expanding into their historical and religious imaginations. Viewers are now invited to contemplate more fully the legible and complementary textual components of the paintings—previously only possible through Hezekiah’s reading of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall—in the contexts of both their domestic experience and natural environment. The fullness of the paintings’ presentation of their sitters’ distinct characters offers a rich source for additional investigation of their lives and thought. Among other interpretive questions that Frank’s work frames by parallel construction is what passage of Gibbon Hezekiah may be reading. Volume three is clearly portrayed in his hand, and his finger marks a page midway through.25 A possible passage could be Gibbon’s discussion of the circumstances of Britain’s independence from the corrupt and indifferent Roman Empire in AD 409, a notable prefiguration of the American Revolution. Gibbon’s historical epic was, and remains, a study of religious as well historical significance that invites, as does Elizabeth’s Hervey reading, further research into the Beardsleys’ church affiliation and belief. Are both paintings records of religious dissent? If so, what is the role of these portraits as affirmations of their beliefs?

As the basis of study of the Beardsleys has changed over time, new questions have also arisen. Of particular note today, in an era of global commerce, are Hezekiah’s advertisements in local newspapers soliciting animal furs during the same period, the late 1780s, when he also advertised the newest medicines and drugs for sale from London and Amsterdam.26 Why was a New Haven doctor looking for pelts? Was he bartering abroad for his inventory of new medicines with furs brought down the Quinnipiac River? The trade places him, and the landscape outside his window, in an Atlantic marketplace of goods and people through the port of New Haven. In addition to the clothes and furnishings visible in the Beardsley portraits, the posthumous inventory of their home enumerates every aspect of their material experience, inviting study of their place in the Atlantic market in combination with Hezekiah’s business interests.27 Despite being known for decades, the Beardsley portraits offer continued promise to open our understanding of their world ever wider.