Lot 617: * RUTH WHITTIER SHUTE AND SAMUEL ADDISON SHUTE (1803-1882, 1803-1836)

painted in New Hampshire circa 1831; in the original black and gold frame.

watercolor, pen and ink on paper

23 1/2 by 19 3/4 in. 59.7 by 50.2cm

Descended in the family of the sitters
John McInnis Auction, May 5, 1996, Amesbury, Massachusetts
A private collector
Gemini Antiques, New York

The fashionably-dressed children painted against a backdrop of shade trees, foliage and grapevines, holding fruit and a whip respectively, while their brown dog jumps on the older boy to get his attention.

The Prescott family is best-known today for having a park in their name in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Helen and Steven Kellogg's entry in American Radiance for Samuel Addison and Ruth Whittier Shute note that they "were an unusually talented, prolific and enterprising pair of artists who married in Sommerworth, New Hampshire, on October 16, 1827. Ruth was born in Dover, New Hampshire, on Octover 3, 1802, the eighth of nine children; Samuel was born on September 24 of the same year. He attended the Governer Dummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, and went on to study medicine at Dartmouth College.

After his marriage, Dr. Shute's focus shifted away from medicine, and he joined his wife in an artistic partnership that took the couple through the hamlets and small cities of northern New England and New York State, selling their services as itinerant portrait painters. Their efforts met with considerable success until Samuel's untimely death in Champlain, New York, in 1836, at the age of 32.

The Shutes employed a highly unusual method of painting, in that they simultaneously directed their creative energies to the same portrait. Although the great majority of their works are unsigned, a number of them are inscribed on the reverse, Painted by R.W. Shute and S.A. Shute. In several, their contributions are more specifically documented as having been Drawn by R.W. Shute and Painted by S.A. Shute.

This apparently felicitous collaboration combined an attraction to multiple styles with an interest in experimenting with a diverse and unorthodox mixture of materials, and the resulting body of work exhibits an astonishing vitality and complexity. When a portrait was painted in oil the artists frequently interspersed applications of pigment with layers of varnish and glazes. When working on paper, their primary medium was watercolor, but that was freely supplemented with pastel, gouache, pencil, collage, gum arabic and blank areas in order to obtain different effects. Their work is fresh and spontaneous, but great care seems to have been taken to obtain the individuality of the sitter, resulting in insighful renderings and likenesses that reflect a compelling degree of personal engagement. The Shutes were particularly effective in their sympathetic portraits of children, having become parents themselves in 1829.

Although vital and intensely productive, their joint career was tragically brief. The probability that Samuels' death was preceded by a lingering illness is evidenced by the fact that, by September 1833, Ruth alone was signing paintings. For four years after her husband's death, Ruth continued to travel the region and paint, before marrying Alpha Tarbell and moving to Lexington, Kentucky. Her last known portrait is of her granddaughter, dated 1874."

For three other children's portraits by the Shutes in the Ralph Esmerian Collection, see Stacy C. Hollander, American Radiance, pp. 50-51, 54 and 387-391, figs. 20, 21 and 24.

Accompanying this lot is a copy of a May 1996 article from Arts and the Antiques Weekly about its initial sale.