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1840 Miniature Portrait on Ivory FineYoungMan MaineEsta
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1840 Miniature Portrait on Ivory FineYoungMan MaineEsta
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Antique handmade & hand painted miniature oil paint portrait on a piece of ivory of a fine young Maine man, just past boyhood, in a blue overcoat with a black collar, neatly combed hair, youthful & sparse facial sideburns, pleasing disposition, original old mount paper glued to the rear and retaining it's original old dry surface, as found. Probably Boston but possibly Maine , 1840, possibly earlier. Guaranteed old and original; this is not a fake or reproduction. Actual weight 1/4 lbs. 1 7/8" wide by 2 1/4" tall by 5/8" thick. Antique handmade & hand painted miniature oil paint portrait on a piece of ivory of a fine young Maine man, just past boyhood, in a blue overcoat with a black collar, neatly combed hair, youthful & sparse facial sideburns, pleasing disposition, original old mount paper glued to the rear and retaining it's original old dry surface, as found. We found this in the family desk, a treasure box containing generations of small antiques that we have been listing. When one encounters a formal style miniature portrait (oil portrait on ivory done by a professional miniaturist) in âe¦an old Maine deskâe¦ in an old Maine farmâe¦ that has become an old Maine estateâe¦ usually located in a formerly well tended agrarian regionâe¦ now gone "back to woods" with the passed-down-through-the-family of the estate "declined" and âe¦the property in now in neglectâe¦ one may wonder "how" and "who can this be". The agrarian aristocracy that rose in Maine in the second quarter of the 19th century only to have it's male population decimated by the Civil War and the agrarian economic base defused by western states development and industrializationâe¦ is the shadowy answer. This young man, reared on the farm, educated properly at home and at local schools, was one of the better set of young boys. A better set boy "went on" while the average boy "stayed". "Went on" generally was being employed as a bookkeeper -accountant-mercantile manager-in-training in a coastal town, the bigger the better, preferably BOSTON . Paid, so not apprenticed, young & single, in the city and surrounded by similar âe¦boysâe¦ they became menâe¦ of commerceâe¦ and very occasionally returned to their small backward Maine coastal farming village andâe¦ became the biggest, richest, most well spoken man in town orâe¦. NEVER EVER RETURNED and remains a local legend of a man who left and did something like "start" " Sacramento " "in the gold rush". T is skimpy direct reference to what I have just written but the best is an obscure and scarce Maine classic novel: George H. Devereux, SAM SHIRK: A TALE OF THE WOODS OF MAINE , N.Y., 1871. Sam of the title is a "stayed" boy, who befriends and wins over a "went-on" boy, "James Butler" in a fictionalized Cherryfield , Maine . The character "James Butler", returning to "Merryfield" Maine and befriending Sam, is the perfect character for the fine young man in this portrait. I am not going to expostulate further for this reference is a concise affirmation of why this old miniature portrait on ivory of a fine young man âe¦ probably painted in Boston at the time of the boy's work t -usually four years- was found neatly preserved in an old slip of paper inside an old plastic sandwich bag inside an old family deskâe¦ inside an old estate in rural coastal Maine. I WILL staunchly recommend that should one wish to gain sense of place to estates from the 1820's to the Civil War in Maine, please read SAM SHIRK. These are the homes that we glean for our ebay offerings and this âe¦little desk drawer gemâe¦ fits very neatly into the âe¦shadowy documentedâe¦ by fundamentally firmâe¦ history of the estate as we have been listing from. Very good as found condition. The portrait is a little soiled from it's passage through time in this estate. It is loose and has been loose for an indefinite time. It appears, due to the remains of old paper glued to the back, to have been mounted and, presumably, framed at one time. That all is long gone. Otherwise and noting again the whole as lightly soiled, th... 
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