Asa Ames American Folk Art
18 02 10 - 08:21
Asa Ames, a little known American sculptor, worked mostly from life, carving and painting three-dimensional wood portraits of family and friends. When he died of consumption in 1851, at the age of 27, he left behind 12 or 13 sculptures, most made during the last four or five years of his short life.
Much about Ames’s life remains a mystery. It is thought that he may have spent time at sea and might have apprenticed to a carver of ships’ figureheads or trade figures.
Until 25 years ago, Ames’s work, when noticed at all. But in 1981 the American Folk Art Museum received an anonymous work as a gift: a painted wood sculpture of a young girl whose head is painted with a phrenology chart. Stacy C. Hollander, the museum’s senior curator and director of exhibitions, began to research it and
ultimately attributed it to Ames. In 1982 Jack T. Ericson, an antiques dealer, culminated 12 years of research with an article on Ames in Antiques magazine that reproduced the works that could be traced or attributed to him. It included the folk art museum’s piece, which is thought to have been made at the end of Ames’s life, when he was ill and living with a doctor who practiced alternative medicine.A beautiful and overpopulated daguerreotype portrait of the artist as a serious young artist. Ames is in his Sunday best, working intently on the bust of a man. Three sculptures look on from the upper right: a pudgy baby with a drape of real fabric and the busts of two other children in carved, off- the- shoulder togas.
The busts teeter on a sculpting pedestal beneath which is the young man whose portrait bust Ames works on. The carving of a hand and real-looking bass viol visible behind this party of five increase the sense of elaborate stage-managing. Ames was probably ill when this photograph was made, and perhaps he knew that obscurity threatened. Still, when the time came — and it has come — he intended to be ready for his close-up. Via N.Y. Times
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