The itinerant artist Ammi Phillips (1788-1865), one of America’s most significant portrait painters of the nineteenth century, began his career as a portraitist in Massachusetts shortly before 1809. In that year he first advertised his services in the Berkshire Reporter while staying at William Clarke’s tavern in Pittsfield for a two to three-week period, expressly for the purpose of painting portraits. Phillips returned to the same establishment the following year and placed another advertisement, inviting the ladies and gentlemen of the area to apply to him for the painting of correct likenesses. 1

Portraits from these years have yet to be discovered. The earliest known portraits by Phillips date from 1811, when he returned to Berkshire County and boarded with Dr. Samuel Barstow and his family in Great Barrington. Barstow, a doctor and shopkeeper who also owned a tavern, recorded Phillips’s visit in his diary, which he kept from 1809 until his death in 1813. Three entries from August to October 1811 make reference to Phillips and the painting of likenesses of the doctor, his wife Lavinia and his three children Pluma, Charles and Oliver. The full-length portraits of Pluma Amelia Barstow and Charles Rollin Barstow surfaced in the early 1980s; the location of the portraits of Dr. and Mrs. Barstow and their son Oliver Barstow is unknown. 2 In late 1811, Phillips executed portraits of two other Berkshire County residents--Chloe Allis Judson of Sheffield and Gideon Smith, an innkeeper in Stockbridge.

The portraits from 1811 constitute an experimental period in Ammi Phillips’s career, when he was developing a formula for composition and the handling of light and mass. Characteristics distinctive of his next phase emerge during this period, including almond-shaped eyes, full, generous mouths and an outlining of features.

Phillips was working in Hudson, New York, by 1812-1813, when he painted portraits of Ashbel Stoddard (1763-1840) and his wife Patience Bolles Stoddard (1762-1841), who were among Hudson’s earliest residents, settling in the city just one year after it was founded in 1783.3 Ashbel Stoddard in particular is of great importance in the history of Hudson and of Columbia County, as he was the first printer in Hudson, one of the earliest printers and publishers in the Upper Hudson region and publisher of the first newspaper in the county.

Ashbel Stoddard was born in 1763 in Saybrook, Connecticut, one of three children of Simeon Stoddard and his wife Sarah Waterhouse Stoddard.4 In 1755, following completion of his studies at Yale University, Simeon set up as a Congregational minister in the north parish of Saybrook, where he met his future wife Sarah. Simeon and Sarah married in January 1761 and had their first child, Simeon Stoddard, that same year. Ashbel was born two years later, followed by his sister Sarah in 1766.

Stoddard came from a long line of Congregational ministers on both his father’s and mother’s side of the family. 5 He had a strict religious upbringing, which was later reflected in the themes of many of the books and pamphlets he published in Hudson. His career and accomplishments reflect an education with emphasis on reading and writing as well as religion. As a university educated minister, Simeon Stoddard no doubt instilled in his children an appreciation of literature, albeit of a religious nature or moral tone.

Before settling in Hudson, Stoddard served an apprenticeship at one of New England’s leading journals, the Connecticut Courant in Hartford. 6 It was here that he learned the printing and newspaper trades.

In the fall or winter of 1784, Stoddard and his wife Patience took up residence in the fledgling city of Hudson, which had been founded just one year earlier by thirty Quaker merchant-seamen from Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Stoddard set up a printing office and bookstore at the southeast corner of Third and Warren Streets the following spring.7

On April 7, 1785, he began publication of Hudson’s first newspaper, the Hudson Weekly Gazette , in partnership with Charles R. Webster, a fellow apprentice at the Connecticut Courant . Webster had arrived in Albany several years earlier and set up a printing shop before reviving publication of the Albany Gazette . He withdrew from the Hudson newspaper in 1786. Stoddard continued to publish the Hudson Weekly Gazette until 1803-1804, by which time he had become discouraged by the acrimony of party politics. He also published the short-lived literary journals Columbian Magazine from 1814 to 1815 and Messenger of Peace, Devoted to Doctrine, Religion, and Morality from 1824 to 1825.

Stoddard’s printing office produced more than 400 titles in addition to printing Stoddard’s Diary or Columbia Almanack from 1785 into the 1830s.8 Some of these titles fell into the category of “chapbooks,” or cheap printed material usually containing engraved illustrations. In addition to books, Stoddard also printed pamphlets and broadsides. 9 In the late 1790s, the Hudson city government contracted Stoddard to print paper currency, which substituted for small silver and copper coins that had become scarce.10

The books printed by Stoddard from 1785 into the early decades of the nineteenth century were frequently religious in nature, including sermons delivered at churches in Albany, Schenectady and Hudson, histories of the bible and of biblical figures and compilations of hymns and spiritual songs. In the closing years of the eighteenth century Stoddard also printed titles relating to the formation and development of the United States government as well as documents associated with the nation’s founding fathers, including Washington’s Farewell Address, printed in 1797. In his portrait of Stoddard, Ammi Phillips depicted the “pioneer printer of Hudson” holding a copy of the address. Three years later, Stoddard printed George Washington’s will and a schedule of his property to be sold.

From about 1800 to 1830, Stoddard produced a large number of instructional books for children in addition to juvenile poems and stories with a distinctly moral tone. During these years he also printed a number of works written for the moral guidance and spiritual benefit of women. One of these titles, The History of Charlotte Temple, a Tale of Truth , printed by Stoddard in 1803, was a national best seller.

In addition to operating a printing office, Stoddard also maintained a bookstore where he sold not only the titles he printed but also bibles of various sizes, school supplies, letter paper, wrapping paper, blank books, lawyers’ and justices’ blanks, writing and printing ink, Shaker garden seeds, certificates and pictures. 11 One early history of Hudson mentions that the interior of his bookstore was frequently festooned with strings of goose quills (for writing) that were hung to season.

In February 1793, tragedy befell Stoddard when his printing shop and bookstore were destroyed by fire. At the time, Hudson had no fire company or readily available supply of water to extinguish the conflagration. Consequently the blaze remained unchecked and the building burned to the ground. 12 This was the first fire in the city of Hudson. The incident inspired local citizens to take up a subscription for the purchase of the city’s first fire engines and encouraged Hudson’s leaders to form the earliest fire companies. With financial assistance from his fellow citizens, Stoddard rebuilt on the same site and resumed publication of the Gazette .

Stoddard had a strong sense of civic duty and demonstrated concern for Hudson’s progress and development. It appears that the first library in Hudson, established in 1786, was run from Stoddard’s office and may have been located in his bookstore. 13 He presented Christ Church with a royal quarto bible as a Christmas gift in 1802. 14 In 1806, he served as one of the incorporators of the Hudson Mechanical Society.15

Stoddard and his wife Patience had six children, all born in Hudson between 1790 and 1803. 16 Three died in infancy and a fourth child passed away at age seventeen. Only two of their children, Sarah Stoddard (1790-1877) and William Bolles Stoddard (1803-1884), lived to adulthood.

The Stoddard family resided at 131 Warren Street, at the southeast corner of Third and Warren Streets.17 An 1873 map of the west part of the 3 rd ward in Hudson shows that the Stoddard’s corner lot included a building fronting Warren Street and two smaller structures facing 3 rd Street.

On October 18, 1840, Stoddard died at 77 years of age. He remained active in business until a few days before his death. One obituary described Stoddard as a small man with a delicate constitution, but added “He lived highly respected, and no man ever left a fairer reputation.” 18

Stoddard ensured that his children were well educated and passed on to them a passion for literature. In 1824 William Stoddard began publication of the Rural Repository , a semi-monthly newspaper that featured short stories, poems, biographies and historical anecdotes.19 In its day the Repository was regarded as one of the leading literary periodicals in the United States. The office for the newspaper was located at 135 Warren Street for most of the period in which it was published. William shared this address with his father, whose bookstore most likely occupied the first floor of the building while the Repository offices were located above.20 He moved the office to 131 Warren Street shortly before 1851, the year the newspaper was discontinued.21 For more than twenty-five years the Repository had delighted, amused and educated its devoted readers in Hudson.

William was a job printer as well as publisher of a newspaper. According to advertisements placed in the Repository , he printed handbills, business and address cards, pamphlets, checks and books to order.22 He continued the printing business after publication of the newspaper ceased. The printing office was always at the same location as the office for the Rural Repository .

Sarah Stoddard, who was highly esteemed for her literary skills, assisted her brother William with the editing of the Repository . She wrote both fiction and poetry, and achieved much attention with the publication of her story “The Young Physician.”23 Sarah lived with William and his family at 131 Warren Street until her death in 1877.

Succeeding generations were just as industrious and accomplished as Ashbel Stoddard and his children. For instance, William’s daughter Sarah Stoddard Eddy (1831-1904), wife of Reverend Richard Eddy, was a reformer actively involved in the women’s suffrage movement. 24 While she and her husband resided in Boston, Sarah was a member of a number of women’s literary clubs, educational unions and suffrage associations. She had organized similar clubs and associations in the various towns where she and her husband resided before settling in Massachusetts.

In about 1812, Ammi Phillips left Massachusetts for New York State and settled briefly in Hudson, arriving when the city was still prosperous but on the brink of an economic decline brought about by the War of 1812. Here he painted portraits of one of the city’s leading citizens, Ashbel Stoddard, and his wife Patience. The portraits of the Stoddards depict a confident, sophisticated and fashionably dressed married couple who had achieved an enviable level of material comfort and occupied respectable positions in society. The symbol of Stoddard’s success as a printer is seen in the copy of Washington’s Farewell Address held in his left hand. The cultured and leisured lifestyle that Stoddard’s prosperous business afforded his wife is implied by the book of poems that Patience tilts forward in her right hand.

The portraits of the Stoddards represent a transition from Phillips’s experimental phase to the beginning of his so-called Border period. During the years 1812 to 1819, when Phillips painted in the border regions of Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York, his portraits exhibited a greater degree of realism while retaining many of the naïve elements of the works from 1811. He also introduced to his portraits a light, pearly gray background that would be supplanted later by a dark, velvety ground characteristic of his succeeding phase, the Realistic period of 1820 to 1828.

In the Stoddard portraits, Phillips accurately depicted details of clothing and personal features. The viewer can clearly see the trim on Patience’s brown dress, the pattern in her lace sleeves and the oiled ringlets in her hair. Stoddard’s collar and cravat are portrayed in detail, as are the brass buttons on his coat. This realism extends to the folio of Washington’s Farewell Address, where Phillips transcribed the text exactly as it was published.

The Stoddard portraits feature the almond-shaped eyes, full mouths and heavy outlining that continued to appear in Phillips’s portraits throughout the 1810s. The palette and background remain dark as in the portraits of 1811, but both would gradually become lighter in the portraits Phillips painted over the next few years.

It is possible that Phillips painted the portrait of another Hudson resident either shortly before or after he executed the portraits of the Stoddards. The records of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection include a photograph of a portrait of a lady attributed to Phillips and dated c.1812. 25 The subject is identified simply as “Mrs. Jenkins.” While not known for certain, the lady may have been a member of the Jenkins family of Hudson. Phillips frequently painted portraits of members of prominent families in the areas where he settled. The Jenkins family was tremendously influential and powerful from the city’s founding in 1783 until the early nineteenth century. Considering the date of the portrait and Phillips’s presence in Hudson about the same time, the lady described as Mrs. Jenkins may indeed have been a member of the Jenkins family of Hudson.

The Stoddard portraits were acquired in the early 1970s by their last owner, Gerald Kornblau. They had evidently passed out of the hands of the Stoddard family many years before. When Kornblau purchased them, there was no information on their provenance. While Phillips occasionally inscribed the reverse of his portraits with the name of the subject and the date that the portrait was painted, there was no such information on the back of the Stoddard portraits. The identity of the subjects was completely unknown.

The first clue to the identity of the gentleman in the pair of portraits was the folio of George Washington’s Farewell Address prominently held in his hand. Kornblau was aware that books or documents appearing in the hands of male subjects depicted in Phillips’s portraits were a device used by the artist to reflect the person’s occupation. Through diligent research, he discovered that Hudson’s first printer, Ashbel Stoddard, had printed Washington’s address in 1797. Further research led Kornblau to an etched profile portrait of Ashbel Stoddard illustrated in Columbia County at the Turn of the Century , an early history of the county published in 1900. A comparison of the printed image with the painted portrait demonstrated distinct similarities between the two figures. For Kornblau, the identity of the middle-aged man holding Washington’s Farewell Address was confirmed. A search through the Stoddard family genealogy yielded the name of Stoddard’s wife.

The Stoddard portraits appear to have first been exhibited in 1974 as part of an exhibition of American folk art held at Amherst College in Massachusetts. 26 The following year Kornblau offered the portraits for sale at the Winter Antiques Show in New York, but was unsuccessful in finding a buyer. In 1976, the portraits were included in an exhibition on Ammi Phillips at the Washburn Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York. The essay in the catalog to the exhibit was written by Mary Childs Black, a noted authority on the work of Phillips. The portraits were shown a third time in New York City, in 1995, when the Museum of American Folk Art hosted the exhibition Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of American Portraiture . Finally, the Stoddard portraits were displayed temporarily in 2005 at the Columbia County Historical Society in Kinderhook, New York, not far from where they had been painted almost two centuries before.

1 For more information on the portraits and career of Ammi Phillips, see Stacy Hollander and Howard P. Fertig, Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of American Portraiture (Museum of American Folk Art, New York, 1994). See also Mary Black, Barbara C. Holdridge and Lawrence B. Holdridge, Ammi Phillips: Portrait Painter, 1788- 1865 (Museum of American Folk Art, New York, 1968).

2 See Mary Black, “Ammi Phillips Portraits Rediscovered,” The Magazine Antiques , September 1987, pp. 558-559.

3 Henry P. Smith, Columbia County at the End of the Century (Hudson, New York, 1900), p. 268. The year the Stoddards arrived in Hudson is confirmed in an obituary of Ashbel Stoddard published in the Hudson Gazette and reprinted by William Stoddard in the Rural Repository , October 24, 1840, vol. 17, no. 10, p. 79. According to an obituary in the Columbia Republican , reprinted in the same issue of Rural Repository , “Mr. Stoddard was one of the earliest settlers of this city.”

4 Elijah Woodward Stoddard, Anthony Stoddard of Boston, Mass., and His Descendants, 1639-1873, a Genealogy (New York, 1873), p. 232.

5 A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life , eds. Frances E. Willard and Mary E. Livermore (Buffalo, New York and Chicago, 1893), p. 271.

6 Smith, Columbia County at the End of the Century , p. 268.

7 Anna R. Bradbury, History of the City of Hudson, New York, with Biographical Sketches of Henry Hudson and Robert Fulton (Hudson, New York, 1908), p. 68. On the title page of a number of books he printed and in issues of the Columbia Almanack , Stoddard listed his location variously as “the White-House, Corner of Warren and Third- Streets,” “in Main-Street (later renamed Warren),” “No. 137, Corner of Warren and Third-Streets” and “No. 135, Warren-Street, Corner of Third-Street.” According to Stoddard’s obituary in the Hudson Gazette , he set up his printing office and bookstore in the spring of 1785.

8 Titles printed by Ashbel Stoddard can be found in WorldCat, an online international library catalog. For a discussion of Stoddard’s profession as a printer, see John L. Brooke, Columbia Rising: Civil Life on the Upper Hudson from the Revolution to the Age of Jackson (North Carolina, 2010).

9 An example of a broadside printed by Stoddard is Gumbo Chaff . According to a hand-written note at the bottom of the sheet, the broadside was printed by Stoddard c.1827-1832. American Song Sheet Collection, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina.

10 Captain Franklin Ellis, History of Columbia County, New York, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers (New York, 1878), p 160.

11 Advertisement by Ashbel Stoddard in Rural Repository , October 22, 1836, vol. 8, no. 10, p. 80.

12 The destruction by fire of Stoddard’s printing office and bookstore is described in Columbia County at the End of the Century , p. 270. The same description is also found in Ignatius Jones, Random Recollections of Albany and of Hudson, with Anecdotes and Sketches of Men and Things (Albany, New York, 1850), p. 13.

13 Byrne Phone, Historic Hudson: An Architectural Portrait (Hensonville, New York, 2005), p. 42.

14 Rev. Sheldon Munson Griswold and William H. Scovill, Centennial of Christ Church, Hudson, New York, 1802- 1902 (Hudson, New York, 1902), p. 15.

15 Ellis, History of Columbia County, New York , p. 199.

16 Stoddard, Anthony Stoddard of Boston, Mass., p. 234.

17 Hudson city directories from 1851 (the first year a Hudson directory was published) through the 1860s and 1870s list the home of both Sarah Stoddard and William Stoddard at 131 Warren Street. An obituary of Sarah Stoddard, taken from the American Art Journal and reprinted in the Hudson Evening Register , November 14, 1877, described the property at the corner of Warren and Third Streets as the “old homestead” and stated that it had been in the Stoddard family for ninety years. It was considered to be one of the oldest historic family residences in Hudson.

18 Stoddard obituary, Rural Repository, vol. 17, no. 10, p. 79.

19 Bradbury, History of the City of Hudson, New York , pp. 68-69.

20 Ashbel Stoddard’s advertisements for his bookstore in issues of the Rural Repository from the 1820s and 1830s list an address of 135 Warren Street, the same address given for the offices of William Stoddard’s newspaper.

21 In the 1851 Hudson city directory, William Stoddard’s office for the Rural Repository is listed at 131 Warren Street.

22 Advertisement in Rural Repository , September 21, 1836, vol. 8, no. 8, p. 64.

23 Obituary of Sarah Stoddard, Hudson Evening Register , November 14, 1877.

24 Woman of the Century , eds. Willard and Livermore, pp. 271-272.

25 The portrait is discussed and illustrated in Ruth Piwonka and Roderic H. Blackburn, Ammi Phillips in Columbia County (Kinderhook, New York, 1975), p. 7, fig. 9. The catalog accompanied an exhibition of the same title.

26 According to notes in a record of the portrait of Ashbel Stoddard found in the Collections Search Center of the Smithsonian Institution, the portrait was included in an American folk art exhibition, Amherst, MA, Mead Art Building, Amherst College, 1974.