Art: Three Yankee Expatriates

Benjamin Blyth Limner BEGS to inform the Public that he has opened a House near the City Coffee-House, for the performance of Limning in Oil, Crayons and miniature.

Numbing provinciality was the lot of artists in America 200 years ago. Limning, as painting was called, was a trade, like ropemaking or wheelwrighting. To most of the itinerant "house, sign and fancy" painters, it gave a meager living. They shifted from town to town in New England, setting down in wiry outline and crude, flat tones the tight lips and beaky noses of parsons, housewives and merchants. There were no art schools, let...