Object of the Day: An Early Twentieth Century American Portrait

This unsigned portrait of a gentleman has always been one of my favorites. He’s got something of a Teddy Roosevelt quality about him. While the artist is unknown, we can get some clues as to its origin by studying the reverse of the canvas.


The portrait was painted on a prepared canvas—meaning that the canvas was pre-stretched and primed and sold commercially to artists. This phenomenon became more prevalent in the Twentieth Century. The reverse of the canvas is stamped, “Prepared Canvas” followed by the name of the company which is illegible. Beneath that, the year 1910 can be faintly made out.

The gentleman’s attire suggests that this was painted in the early Twentieth Century as does the style of his brushy moustache. I can say with great certainty that this is an American portrait. English pre-prepared canvases were stretched with a different kind of nails and would have vastly different markings on the reverse. Similarly, the subject’s bravado speaks more of American portrait painting than it does English. Whereas an English painter would have more likely leaned toward a portrait that captured a fleeting expression, this painter has purposefully posed the figure with a strong, deliberate countenance.

As is often the case with the portraits around here, I wonder who he is and what he did with his life. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know. However, he’s now a part of the happy two-dimensional family which lines the walls of a house in Texas. The painters and subjects of these portraits would probably have never guessed that such a thing would ever happen.