Folk
JOHN BRADLEY (1801–c. 1847)
Portrait of Mrs. Mary Ann Brackett Totten, 1834
Oil on canvas, 33 x 27 in.
Signed, dated, and inscribed (at lower left): I. Bradley Delin. 1834; (on the back): Mary Ann Totten. / Aged 22 Years 1834. / Drawn by I. Bradley. / From Great Britton.
RECORDED: Mary Childs Black and Stuart P. Feld, “Drawn by I. Bradley From Great Britton,” The National Gallery of Canada Bulletin 4 (August 1966), pp. 2, 4, 6 fig. 10 // Mary Childs Black and Stuart P. Feld, “Drawn by I. Bradley From Great Britton,” The Magazine Antiques 90 (October 1966), pp. 504, 505 fig. 9 illus., 507 // Rosemary Fitzgerald, “Artist John Bradley and the Totten Portraits,” Staten Island Historian 31 (January-March 1971), pp. 42–43 // Beatrix T. Rumford, ed., American Folk Portraits: Paintings and Drawings from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1981), p. 62 note 4 // Arthur Kern and Sybil Kern, “On Some Little-Known Miniature Portraits by Well-Known American Folk Painters,” Folk Art 20 (Spring 1995), p. 51 // M. [Milton] C. Trexler, “Update on John Bradley, New York City Nineteenth-Century Folk Painter,” February 25, 2006, p. 6
EXHIBITED: Museum of American Folk Art, New York, October 31–December 10, 1967, Folk Artists in the City: Paintings and Carvings Done by Artists in the Greater New York Area
EX COLL.: [Yonderhill Dwellers, Palisades, New York, until mid-1960s]; to private collection and by descent, until 2025
Bradley’s penchant for formal poses is apparent in his portraits of Abraham and Mary Ann, wherein he depicts his subjects seated in three-quarter view, their left hands resting on the rail of stenciled Hitchcock chairs as they gaze outward at the viewer. Dressed in a black suit, Abraham holds a mechanical pencil in one hand while his spouse, wearing a dark dress with gigot sleeves, holds feminine attributes in the form of a handkerchief and book. Other elements, such as Mary Ann’s filagree earrings, brooch, and the scalloped edging along her gauzy ruff collar––as well as her husband’s eye-catching waistcoat fob––attest to the artist’s penchant for decorative accoutrements that allude to his subjects’ status. Both portraits well exemplify Bradley’s signature style with its sharply defined forms and distinctive palette in which sections of black and white are offset by jewel-like reds, greens, and golds. The unadorned backdrop, which transitions from a gentle taupe to a darker brown in each of the portraits, allows us to focus our attention directly on the sitters: Abraham, with his high forehead, heavy brows, and ruddy cheeks, and his wife, her heart-shaped face made even more comely by her wide, almond-shaped eyes and finely pointed chin. As well as demonstrating Bradley’s interest in recording his sitters’ physical traits, the portraits of Abraham and Mary also reveal perhaps the most interesting and unique aspect of his work, namely, his tendency to delicately outline portions of his figures in white, a practice that imbued his figures with a sense of volume.
