More Ohio faces

In our August 2007 issue, Peter and Leslie Warwick and Arthur and Sybil Kern introduced us to a group of folk artists working in Ohio in the nineteenth century. Several readers alerted the authors to related works, and they have kindly shared these updates with us.

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Publication of the article "Four Ohio nineteenth-century folk artists" in the August 2007 issue of The Magazine ANTIQUES led to the discovery of two additional portraits by or attributable to Robert Seevers, one of the artists discussed, and of three portraits by a fifth artist, Marcus Aurelius Root, who later became famous as a daguerreotypist but turns out to have started his training as a pupil of Seevers.

A descendant of the sitter brought the portrait of Jacob Gomber Metcalf in Figure 1 to our attention. It is inscribed on the back, "Drawn by Robert Seevers, April 10, 1831." According to the descendant, Metcalf was born in Cambridge, Guernsey County, Ohio, on October 8, 1810, to Susan Gomber and Judge George Metcalf and remained in Cambridge, about thirty miles from Seevers in West Carlisle, until at least 1840, when he is listed there in the Ohio census. He married Elizabeth Henderson and they had eight children. The family moved to Wheeling, West Virginia, where tradition holds that Metcalf ran the Black Bear Tavern until he died of apoplexy at the dinner table on September 28, 1858.

The likeness of the unidentified gentleman in Figure 2 was the next to come to light. It is attributable to Seevers on the basis of its strong stylistic resemblance to the watercolors of an unidentified couple in our article. (1) Interestingly, the portrait retains its original frame (not shown), which is unusual in having all four corners mortised and tenoned, a construction indicative of a craftsman with above average woodworking skills. As Seevers was trained as a cabinetmaker, it is conceivable that he also made the frame.

The most exciting discovery was brought to our attention by Jeffrey Pressman, a friend who happened to visit the Avery Downer House and Robbins Hunter Museum in Granville, Ohio, and saw three portraits there that were so similar to those in our August article that they had to belong to the same group. In fact, they are the work of a fifth artist, the aforementioned Marcus Aurelius Root, otherwise well known as a daguerreotype photographer. The subjects are Emily Boardman Spelman (Fig. 3) and her daughters Charlotte Maria (Fig. 4) and Martha Emily (Fig. 5). The mother's portrait is signed "Drawn by Marcus Root, September 18, 1830," and the inscription in another hand on the likeness of Martha notes that she was three years old when it was drawn. The Spelman family acquired what is now the Avery Downer House in 1845, and Charlotte, who never married, lived there until her death in 1903. Her sister Martha and Martha's husband, Edward M. Downer (1826-1914), and their five children lived in the house until 1912.

Little has been published about Root's life, but an article by Gloria Hoover in the Newark, Ohio, Advocate of October 7, 1984, provided some fascinating details. (2) He was born on August 15, 1808, the eldest of eight children of Martin (1781-1838) and Mary Barrett Root (1786-1826), who had arrived in Granville, Ohio, in 1805 with the earliest settlers from Granville, Massachusetts.

His training with Seevers is documented in a letter of May 16, 1830, in which his stepsister Deborah Sheldon wrote to his stepbrother Samuel Sheldon, "Brother, would you believe me if I tell you that Marcus is with Mr. Severs a drawing; he has spent most of the time for the last two weeks with him, and thinks of staying next and then leave for himself it is his intention to repair immediately to Athens [Ohio] where he thinks he shall make well." (3) By August of that year Root was working independently and even had pupils of his own, for he wrote to Samuel Sheldon on August 16: "C. Bancroft [who] teaches school in Granville, often enquires about you. I have a face to make for her and all of the Judge's family Perhaps you have not heard that I follow facemaking for a living. Well it is no more strange than true. I have made from two to three in a day, at $1.37 1/2 & .50 per each. Notwithstanding I am learning fast, and have learnt R. T. Wheeler for eight dollars and have Samuel L. Howe under me at this time." (4)

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According to Root's obituary in the Philadelphia Press on April 16, 1888, he continued to practice drawing for several years and even went to Philadelphia about 1834 to study with Thomas Sully, although the latter was not encouraging about his prospects as a professional artist. Root then established a penmanship school in Philadelphia in 1838 before recognizing the potential of the new medium of photography and going on to his successful career as a daguerreotype portraitist. He won first prize in photography at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, showed a collection of daguerreotypes of famous Americans at the Centennial Exhibition in 1876, and wrote one of the first books on the history of photography, The Camera and the Pencil, in 1864.