What Can’t Be Taught

IN 1923, THE Worcester Art Museum held a special showing of Mrs. Freake and Baby Mary (circa 1674). The linear Elizabethanstyle portrait wasn’t by anyone well known. In fact, it wasn’t by anyone known at all—the painter, who is thought to have been active in the Boston area between 1670 and 1674, is anonymous. Still, the painting garnered a surprising amount of critical attention. Raymond Henniker-Heaton, an English art historian and curator at the Worcester museum, said the work wasn’t a “mere primitive effort.” Instead, he noted, “Our artist’s lack of training was an art gain, and resulted in the balance of his work leaning towards the esthetic rather than the technical.” The work was important, he said, “not because the artist was a painter by instinct, without academic technical skills, but because he was creative by instinct, was little acquainted with studio methods, and was unconscious of any handicap in this respect.”

Early American painting, like , which was referred to as “American primitivism” or simply, “folk art,” started to arouse significant interest among collectors and art historians around the 1910s and ’20s. Figures like Robert Laurent, Elie Nadelman. and their fellow artists in the Ogunquit group, the dealers Isabel Carleton Wilder and Edith Halpert, curator Holger Cahill, and megacollector Abby Aldrich Rockefeller brought folk art (painting, among many other forms) into vogue and into museums. In these 17th-, 18th-, and early-19th-century paintings, which were often executed by amateurs, modernists found pictorial continuity with their own work. Cahill wrote in a 1931 issue of that when he was introduced to Laurent’s collection of “American primitives,” he realized that the artist and other post-Armory Show modernists had “inadvertently found in these creations a means to dignify their own use of simplified forms, arbitrary perspective, and unmixed color by suggesting that such methods were rooted in an earlier American tradition.”