IMPORTANT MINIATURE PORTRAIT OF GEORGE WASHINGTON Enamel on Copper Height: 3 1 / 2 inches, Width: 2 7 / 8 inches Provenance: Dr. William F. Horton, New York; Bernard & S. Dean Levy, Inc., New York; Collection of Reverend Gallup; Private Collection, New York. Reference: G.A. Eisen, Portraits of Washington, Volume II , pages 491-495 discusses other Birch portraits of Washington, and Plate CLXXIII illustrates a similar miniature; See also, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, American Paintings and Historical Prints from the Middendorf Collection , number 11. Other examples are in such institutions as The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Yale University Art Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. William Russell Birch modeled his most celebrated miniatures on full-scale paintings of American heroes. He executed around sixty enamels of George Washington after popular oil portraits by Gilbert Stuart and charged from thirty to one hundred dollars each. Birch's autobiography includes a vivid account of the genesis of these lucrative portraits: "When [Washington] was sitting to Stuart, he told him he had heard there was another artist of merit from London, naming myself, that he would sit to me if I chose. Mr. Stuart brought me the message. I thanked Mr. Stuart, and told him that as he had painted his picture, it would be a mark of the highest imposition to trouble the Gen'l to sit to me, but that when I had copied his Picture of him in Enamel, which was my forte, that I would show it to the Gen'l., and thank him for his kind offer, which, when I had done, I waited upon the Gen'l with a note that an artist waited the Honour of showing personally to the Gen'l a specimen of his talents. When I saw the Gen'l I put the picture into his hands. [He looked at it steadfastly, . . . till feeling myself awkward I begun the history of Enamel Painting, which by the time I got through he complimented.
PAIR OF CHIPPENDALE SIDE CHAIRS Philadelphia Circa 1770 The knee carving attributed to John Pollard (1740-1787), the crest carving attributed to “The Spiky Leaf Carver” Primary Wood: Walnut, Secondary Woods: Atlantic White Cedar, Yellow Pine Height: 40 inches, Width: 24 1 / 2 inches, Depth: 23 inches Provenance: The pair was re-assembled in the 1980s so the chairs have varied histories. They are as follows: Chair III Israel Sack, Inc., New York; E.J. Nusrala, St. Louis, Missouri; and chair VIII, George Horace Lorimer, Pennsylvania; Benjamin Ginsburg, New York; Israel Sack, Inc., New York; E.J. Nusrala, St. Louis, Missouri. References: These chairs appear in Patricia E. Kane, "Living with Antiques: A Saint Louis couple collects," The Magazine Antiques, May 2002 , page 117, plate VIII; and also American Antiques from Israel Sack Collection, Volume VIII , page 2083, P5337. They appear in The St. Louis Art Museum exhibition and catalog by David Conradsen, Useful Beauty: Early American Decorative Arts from St. Louis Collections , entry 7. One of these two chairs, or another from the same set, was included in the 1929 exhibition and catalog, Girl Scout Loan Exhibition number 654. The catalog notes that the chair is "a splendid example of great individuality and charm, it deserves a place with the best of Philadelphia's eighteenth century furniture."
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