Painting by Ammi Phillips, c. 1820
In 1956 my father drove our comparatively new Ford from Michigan to Phoenicia, New York, a town in the Catskills known today for skiing and tubing, to retrieve furnishings stored in the attic of Grace Longyear, my mother’s first cousin once removed. Among these were a delicately painted knock-off of a Mary Gregory pitcher, a stoneware jug under whose glaze the name “William F. Van Netten Saugerties” was broadly scrawled in blue, a good deal of Eastlake period furniture, and a portrait of a handsome young man in 1820’s costume with red hair and a cowlick. The furniture was deposited in a friend’s colonial-era summer home in New Hampshire while the smaller objects and the portrait came back to Michigan with us.
Eight years old at the time, I loved Phoenica, whose Esopus Creek flowed behind our boarding house, and I delighted in our friends’ 1790’s home in the White Mountains, but I was less than impressed by the primitive ancestor portrait, which my mother hung proudly over our fireplace. To an eight-year-old, adults come in two categories, grown-up or elderly, so neither the man’s vibrant youth nor his good looks registered with me. Handsome was Tab Hunter, not this austere man with his haughty pose and black suit. The painting’s black frame together with the fact it had never been cleaned, despite years spent in the company of wood, oil, and candle smoke, made it downright gloomy. I named it “Jarvis,”* which seemed to capture the man’s antique austerity. My mother was mildly chargrined by my lack of respect for her ancestor, but both my father and sister took secret delight in my cheekiness, and the name stuck.
My mother tended to make us all a little crazy with her "heirlooms." Decades later I finally understood why people of my grandmother's era thought so highly of “heirlooms” (as opposed to simply “antiques”). Heirlooms separated that generation from the immigrants flooding into the country at the turn of the 20th century. Heirlooms meant your family had been in America for a long time, had founded the country and its traditions. My mother grew up under that tutelage, and, although I doubt she thought in exactly those terms, she was proud of her family, its colonial origins, and its heirlooms. The rest of us remained somewhere between bemused and skeptical, however. My father was the son of those very immigrants my mother’s family wished to distinguish themselves from, and we children were Mid-Westerners with scant regard for coastal mores. Hence: Jarvis.
Years passed, and Jarvis rotated in and out of his post above the fireplace as my mother acquired additional art she wanted to display there. My sister Gretel and I grew up, left home, and thought little about him until we came upon the painting stashed away in the front room closet when we cleaned out my mother’s house in 2000. Gretel, who still lived in Michigan, claimed it, had room to hang it and the money to have it cleaned and restored. With close to 200 years of dirt removed, the painting glowed, and fifty years gave me a different perspective on this handsome, rather sensuous young man with his flamboyant red hair. We both agreed that Jarvis was a dead ringer for our cousin Ted, my mother’s nephew, who had the same red hair, blue eyes and cowlick. The man was definitely an ancestor; no one had to convince us of that.
Theodore Story, Jr. "Cousin Ted"
The art restorer who handled Jarvis judged the painting to be worth around $2000 but suggested it would have greater value if we could find out more of its history. For close to a decade we talked about taking Jarvis back to the Hudson Valley, but I was overwhelmed with work on our newly purchased Mill Brook House, and we kept putting off the research trip. Finally, in 2013, I agreed to go. Studying a genealogy chart Cousin Ted had given me, I determined that the painting had nothing to do with the Longyears, despite having been in Grace’s attic, and suggested we start in Saugerties, where our grandmother Isabel had grown up, a Hudson River town at the mouth of the same Esopus Creek that flows through Phoenicia. An amateur ancestry specialist in Saugerties guided us to the graves of our great-great grandparents on both sides of our grandmother’s family, the Cornwells and the Van Nattens, all born in the late 1820’s or 1830’s, none old enough to be Jarvis, who, judging by his costume, had been born c. 1800.
Discovering who had painted Jarvis proved easier, however, than finding out who he was. Observing a photograph of the painting, the ancestry specialist suggested it might be by Ammi Phillips, a highly collectable Hudson Valley folk artist working at the turn of the 19th century, who never signed his work. A curator at the Albany Institute of History and Art confirmed her suspicion, ushering us into the museum’s storage area and pulling out a panel hung with Ammi Phillips portraits for comparison. Even the frame and texture of the linen on which Jarvis was painted bore a striking resemblance to those in the Institute’s Ammi Phillips collection. A curator at New York’s American Folk Art Museum declined to authenticate the painting on the basis of a photograph but confirmed off the record that Jarvis was indeed by Ammi Phillips. Skinner, the Boston auction house, had no doubts about the authenticity and accepted the painting for its late summer Americana auction. Gretel drove Jarvis to Boston in June, and his face appeared on the cover of the Skinner catalogue. Steve and I attended the August event and watched him sell for over $30,000. The auctioneer gave me a big hug: my 15 minutes of fame. I telephoned Gretel with the good news.
Jarvis on the auction block
But who was Jarvis? And how did he come to be in Grace Longyear’s attic?
The Longyears were related to my mother’s family by marriage, not by blood, so, given the resemblance to Cousin Ted, Jarvis could not have been a Longyear. Grace’s mother, Mary Cornwell, was my great-grandfather’s sister. It’s possible that Mary Cornwell owned the portrait and passed it down to Grace, but why would Grace have passed it on to my mother when she had children of her own who might have inherited it, and why would it have been stored with other things that had apparently belonged to my mother’s family?
More likely the portrait had belonged to Grace’s uncle, my great-grandfather, and his wife, Ella Van Natten. Ella survived her husband by twelve years and, at some point in those twelve years, moved to Phoenicia, where she died. It’s not clear whether her own family, the Van Nattens, had relatives in Phoenicia, but her husband had two sisters, Mary and Jennie, living there, and letters indicate that both Ella and her daughter, my grandmother Isabel, spent considerable time in Phoenicia even before Ella’s husband, Theodore Cornwell, died.
Isabel May Cornwell, also a red-head, was popular with a lively group of friends who gathered in Phoenicia.
If people in that era were proud of their families’ long tenure in America, those of Dutch descent were especially proud. The Dutch East India Company had explored and settled the Hudson Valley before the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth and controlled it until defeated by the English in 1664. Kingston and Saugerties were in the heart of those early Dutch settlements. Even in my own childhood, the significance of being a Van Natten or a descendant was a point of comment if not outright pride. For Ella, being a Van Natten was no doubt immensely important.
Ella’s mother Ervilla Scott, wife of William H. Van Natten, lived with Ella and Theodore Cornwell from 1907 until her death in 1918 and would have brought things she deemed precious along with her. My guess is that when Ella moved to Phoenicia, she took as much of her family’s legacy with her as she still possessed. That included silver spoons inscribed with “Van Natten” and the “Van Netten” [sic] jug. The Jarvis portrait may well have been part of that same legacy. (The jug is inscribed with the name of Ella’s brother, William F. Van Natten, who pre-deceased her in 1914. He probably commissioned it for his business, though why the name was misspelled is as great a mystery as Jarvis’s identity.)
My mother with her grandmother, Ella Van Natten Cornwell, 1936
Quite likely, Ella knew Jarvis personally or at least knew who he was. Born c. 1800, he belonged to her grandfather’s generation. Ella’s father William H. Van Natten was born in 1832, so Jarvis could have been his father. He could as easily have fathered Ella’s mother Ervilla Scott, who was born in 1837, or Ella’s husband’s father Charles Edwin Cornwell, born 1829, or his wife Jane Williams, also born in 1832. Possibly he was an uncle rather than father to any of these four people. But that he was related to one of them seems certain.
The Van Natten grave monument in Saugerties. This side bears the names of William H. and Ervilla.
Our failure to identify Jarvis is not the only unfortunate aspect of this otherwise happy story. A year after our trip to Saugerties, Gretel’s health began to fail, and she died in January 2015. The loss was devastating, but I was so very grateful that I had finally agreed to the Jarvis trip two years earlier. We could not know it would be our last trip together, but how appropriate that it connected us to our ancestors from our mother back to our great-great grandparents and to Jarvis himself, whoever he was.
*The nickname we gave our painting is not to be confused with the painter John Wesley Jarvis, who lived and worked at approximately the same time as Ammi Phillips.