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| Born: Died: Biography: Art historian Laura Luckey proclaimed in 1993, “Nina Fletcher Little’s contribution to the discovery and documentation of many late eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American folk and provincial artists is virtually unparalleled. While Nina was successful in tracking down the identities of a number of formerly anonymous painters, she was never able to discover anything about the A. Ellis who painted Diantha Atwood Gordon. She did learn something, however, about the subject of the painting. Diantha was born in Fairfield, Maine, in 1809, and married Washington Gordon, also of Fairfield, in 1828. After an image of the painting appeared in the antiques journal, Maine Antiique Digiest, in 1981, Diantha Gordon’s great-granddaughter contacted Nina and told her something of her family’s history. Apparently Diantha and her husband were so disagreeable that their granddaughter (Nina’s contact’s mother) once locked the two in an outhouse where they were not discovered until evening. The painting of Diantha was completed in 1832. Its style is the type that most delights lovers of folk art, for the flatness of the painting and the displaced ear seem to foreshadow the bold geometric patterns found in modern art of the early twentieth century. Chosen by the Littles to embody their idealized vision of rural New England, these objects and others at Cogswell’s Grant suggest a myth about New England that still prevails. The combination of worn surfaces and rich earth tones, and the juxtaposition of naïve portraits with colorful hand-worked floor coverings evoke a sense of a comfortable preindustrial life. That such a life never existed makes it no less important. The Littles’ collection evokes a golden age, a world that was sweeter and simpler, that remains just out of reach. Carlisle, Nancy. Cherished Possessions, A New England Legacy. Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 2003. |
