Itinerant Potrait Myth?

I found this recently:

"Myth # 66: In the winter, itinerant portrait painters would work ahead, painting canvases with bodies and backgrounds, but no heads, so that come summer, they would have only to fill in the subject’s head."

Found at

http://historymyths.wordpress.com/2011/10/15/myth-66-in-the-winter-itinerant-portrait-painters-would-work-ahead-painting-canvases-with-bodies-and-backgrounds-but-no-heads-so-that-come-summer-they-would-have-only-to-fill-in-the-subjects/#comment-771

They conitue with:

"Such a good idea! Stay home during the winter months and paint a stock of canvases with bodies and backgrounds, then ride out in the warmer months to find clients who could select a body and pay to have their head painted on it. A real time saver for both artist and sitter, right?
But there is no evidence for it. No artist or sitter mentioned in dairies or other written records that this practice occurred. No unfinished, headless portrait painted by an early American folk artist has been discovered in an attic or storage shed. (And the few unfinished portraits that do survive inevitably include heads.) No physical evidence, like overlapping paint layers at the neck or head, has been detected on existing portraits. Nonetheless, museum guides say that someone in the group inevitably asks about this whenever folk art portraits come into view.
It makes sense to us today, and it seems to explain the similarities in the clothing and backgrounds of some American folk art portraits. However, in portrait painting, artists typically start with the most important feature—the head—and work the rest around that.
Because there are many examples of portraits that are highly similar in body and background, the myth spread. Scholars such as E. C. Pennington (Lessons in Likeness, 2011) and museums like the American Folk Art Museum, Cooperstown, the Columbus Museum, and Colonial Williamsburg point out the lack of evidence for this practice. "

What the next thin they are going to say is the itinerants didn't also paint signs and other commercial jobs when they needed money!

I do have a less reactionary response.

My response:

There is a painting at the Fearing Tavern Museum in Wareham Mass that the sitters head is very oddly placed her a body. It has been suggested this is a stock painting finished with the sitters head. I will attempt to photograph it, but it may take sometime. The museum is operated by the local historical society and only open on Saturday in August. It was this painting that help fuel my interest in these early American Artist.

Additionally another poster said this:
"At Hammond-Harwood House in Annapolis, MD, we have a portrait by Robert Edge Pine that shows that the head and body were painted separately. You can clearly see a square where the layer of canvas containing the head seems to have been glued on top of the layer showing the body. I don’t think that Pine painted a generic body and then put a specific face on it, but I haven’t been able to find a definite reason for the technique he used. Someday I hope to have time to research it…"

So there you have it! What do you think?


I am posting a portrait of Daniel Webster done by a unnamed Itinerant.