In his five years of documented activity, Joseph H. Davis painted more than 150 watercolor portraits of prosperous middle-class men, women, and children who lived along the Maine-New Hampshire border. These are immediately, and delightfully, recognizable. Adults generally are shown in gaily appointed interiors that attest to the artist's, and the era's, love of decorative patterns. Featured are colorful floor cloths and carpets, wildly grained and painted furniture, and walls ornamented with pictures, banjo clocks, mirrors, and elaborate swags of foliage. Children are shown sitting on their parents' laps or standing at their sides; when portrayed alone, they are customarily seen out-of-doors, walking ceremoniously on carpets of flowers.

Except for the course of travels deduced from his portraits, which are often inscribed with the sitters' names, ages, and places of residence, Davis remains elusive. Recent scholarship has connected him with one Joseph H. Davis from Limington, Maine, who lived from 1811 to 1865. Between 1832 and 1837, the artist worked from Wakefield, New Hampshire, in the north to Lee in the south, and on both sides of the border with Maine, but little else is recorded about him. His name was discovered in 1943 on the watercolor portrait of the Lee, New Hampshire, minister and schoolteacher Bartholomew Van Dame, which in the lower left corner bears the inscription "Joseph H. Davis./Left Hand-/Painter." His left-handedness, a trait he shared, and presumably discussed, with Van Dame, is virtually the only personal characteristic known.

Van Dame (1807-1872) sits at a broad, grain-painted table, strewn with books, that also holds an inkwell and quill pen and a lighted candle, implements that allude to his life as a preacher and scholar (he was especially well known for proficiency in mathematics). Like many of Davis's other sitters, he is represented in profile, leaning back, with legs stretched forward in a pose that precisely follows the line of his painted Empire-style side chair. Davis's love of decoration is seen in the inventively patterned rug, the tin box with scallop-edged lid, and-in lively contrast to Van Dame's somber black suit-a spotted vest and socks. The inscription appearing below the image, ornamented with numerous calligraphic flourishes, is recorded in what New England writing masters taught as the Italian Hand. The backward slant of some of the letters may be the result of Davis's left-handedness; it could equally well be yet another decorative elaboration.

The members of the Demeritt family, Van Dame's contemporaries in nearby Farmington, New Hampshire, were painted the previous year, when, as the inscription at the bottom of Davis's portrait of them indicates, Mark (1792-1875) was forty-three; his wife, Abigail (1799-1881), thirty-six; and daughter Lois Susan, a newborn. In 1835 and 1836, Davis would paint other Demeritts-Isaac T., age twenty-four; John F., age thirty-two, and his younger brother Samuel H., age twenty-five, of Barrington, New Hampshire; and Thomas, age sixty-seven, and Sally, age fifty-seven, of Northwood, New Hampshire. Such a sizable number of commissions from one family was rare, though not unique, in Davis's career, and for an artist who is reported to have earned only $1.50 per portrait, the connection with the Demeritt family must have been welcome.

As in the Van Dame portrait, the Demeritts are shown in profile. They face one another in a rigorously balanced arrangement; Mark Demeritt, a magistrate, selectman, and member of the state legislature, holds the New Hampshire Patriot while Abigail Demeritt holds the baby. On the grain-painted table in front of him is a top hat, while she sits before a vase of flowers. On the wall behind them hangs a handsome landscape painting featuring a little riverside cottage beneath an enormous tree. Such landscapes, usually invented by the artist rather than based on observation, were often repeated from one portrait to another-the Demeritts' landscape echoes, with minor variations, the painting on the wall in a portrait of Joseph and Sarah Ann Emery of Limington, Maine (1834; New York Historical Association, Cooperstown). These fanciful scenes signaled the sitters' status as landowners and enhanced the cozy domesticity of Davis's family portraits.

CT


REFERENCES

Gail and Norbert H. Savage and Esther Sparks. Three New England Watercolor Painters. Ex. cat. Art Institute of Chicago, 1974. Pp. 58, 63.

Arthur and Sybil Kern. "Joseph H. Davis: Identity Established." The Clarion14, Summer 1989, pp. 45-53.