In an 1841 watercolor-and-ink drawing, John James Trumbull Arnold, an itinerant artist who roamed Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania in pursuit of commissions, portrayed himself with a quill in his long, slender fingers and declared himself a "Professor of Penmanship." Below, almost overshadowed, he added "Portrait and Miniature Painter."
Visitors to the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Colonial Williamsburg, Va., can see the flourish of his cursive script on the back of a canvas: "Portrait of / Mary Mattingly / Drawn by John Arnold / On the 26th of October / 1850," he wrote. But it is, of course, the front that places Arnold (1812-c. 1865) in our esteem today.
Mary, age 3 (or possibly 4), is a beguiling little girl with penetrating brown, almond-shaped eyes. She is limned in Arnold's trademark sharp, simple lines. Presented frontally, encircled by a brownish oval background set against black corners, she stares directly at the viewer, holding a red rose in her left hand.
Arnold, the son of a Connecticut doctor who moved to Pennsylvania in 1790 (and is apparently, despite his middle name, no kin to the well-known Connecticut artist John Trumbull ), took no formal art classes but clearly had some training, probably from a tutor. He made a career capturing in paint the nation's growing middle class in the decades before the Civil War. At least two dozen of his paintings have survived, though some are unsigned; other extant works are thought to be by him.
Mary's portrait is part of a family group. She was the eldest child of Sylvester M. Mattingly and Ellen Hogan Mattingly of Mount Savage, Md., a little town in the far northwest of the state. Arnold painted her father on Oct. 21, 1850, and her mother, holding her baby brother, Romanus, on Oct. 25, 1850. Then came Mary. Two weeks later, Arnold painted her aunt and uncle, James and Ann. The previous June, he had painted Sylvester's stepmother, also named Ellen.
To portray adults, Arnold often used a shelf, a chair back or something similar as a prop for one of their hands; sometimes they hold books. For Mary, he chose no such device—only the rose, which might symbolize her singular beauty, adorns her tidy portrait.
She has, in Arnold's rendition, symmetrically arched eyebrows and fine, visible eyelashes. She wears a dress, gathered around her tiny waist, that looks black but was initially dark green. It's trimmed at the neck in white lace, and her sleeves, gathered at the wrist, are trimmed in dark lace. Curators at the museum are unsure about the dress's fabric; it could be cotton, silk or worsted wool.
Families of the period would have instructed their portraitists to avoid betraying the sitter's emotions or personality, but they would have wanted them to signal their class and circumstances. Mary's picture, then, shows her wearing gold bracelets on both arms and a blue-beaded necklace centered on a golden pendant.
Mary's face, though, seems a bit androgynous. And her hair is not arranged in the typical girlish fashion of the period, which would have been short and parted in the middle, not parted on the side. Rather, it is pulled back, perhaps in a braid, and tied with an unusually large, cockeyed white-and-blue bow that gives her a bit of a mischievous character. One wonders if Arnold added the silk ribbon to clarify her gender, as young boys in that era often wore dresses.
Unlike less-skilled itinerant artists of the period, Arnold draws Mary in proper proportion. And he models her face softly, while leaving her hands just a bit flat. There's no detectable light source and the background is devoid of detail: Together, they conspire to focus attention on Mary's unsmiling but charming face. She seems to radiate. All of these qualities combine to raise this painting almost to the realm of fine art and certainly make it a standout among American folk art portraits.
According to the museum's curatorial records, drawn from the Western Maryland Historical Library, Mary never married and spent most of her life in Mount Savage. At some point, she moved to nearby Cumberland, Md., where, in 1909, she was making and selling ice cream. She died, at 73, in 1920.
The portraits of Mary and her parents remained in the family until 1990, when an heir sold them. In 1995, Sylvester and Ellen went on the auction block at Christie's, and they have disappeared into a private collection. When Mary's portrait came up for sale in 2014 at Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates, the museum—already in possession of Arnold's 1841 self-portrait and two lesser works attributed to him—jumped at the opportunity. Even at $33,000, about four times the low estimate, she was a bargain.
Mary was recently revealed to the public for the first time in a long-term exhibition called "We the People: American Folk Portraits," which will remain on view through December 2019.
As for Arnold, his last documented painting is dated 1853, according to the Cumberland County Historical Society. He is said to have drunk himself to a premature death.