Anna Doll (Mrs. James) Vanderpoel

Anna Doll was the wife of James Vanderpoel, a lawyer and later a judge. They lived and raised six children first in Kinderhook, NY, and later in Albany, where James enjoyed a long and successful career. This portrait—and the companion one of his wife her husband—undoubtedly hung in their substantial Federal-style home in Kinderhook. The fifty-year career of portrait painter Ammi Phillips represents one of the most prolific, artistically successful, and perhaps financially stable of any nineteenth-century itinerant American folk artist. The self-taught artist created somewhere between 600 and 2,000 paintings, many of them portraits of middle class people living in rural areas. This painting—considered part of the artist's "realistic period,"�—shows a greater degree of sophistication through the use of facial modeling with light and shadow than his earlier works. The stenciled frame is the original one.