Painting of an unidentified man by Trevor Thomas Fowler. The nose of the man has been repainted. It was missing when I acquired it. The painting has been relined on the back. The writing on the back of the original canvas has been rewritten on the new canvas, which is as follows:
“Painted by Thomas Fowler" and a canvas maker’s mark of “GOO LONDON”
There is a typed label attached to the frame that says it is a portrait of Henry Clay, but I don’t think it is his portrait.
The following information about Fowler is found in A Southern Collection by Estill Curtis Pennington. The book catalogues part of the Southern art at the Morris Museum in Augusta, Georgia:
TREVOR THOMAS FOWLER 1800-1871
Born, Dublin, Ireland; studied at the Royal Academy, London, 1829, and at the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, 1830; active as an itinerant in Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana, along the river route, and in New Orleans.
While Fowler apparently began an international itinerancy in the deep South prior to 1840, his first major public notices came for portraits of William Henry Harrison and Henry Clay, rivals in the presidential election of 1840, which were exhibited in New Orleans that same year. Between 1840 and 1854, Fowler was one of the more energetic and highly visible seasonal itinerants working between New Orleans and Louisville, Kentucky. On several trips he worked in tandem with the Louisiana artist Theodore Sidney Moise. Moise was a rather accomplished provincial animalier who rendered the pets that often appeared in the duo’s more ambitious genre portraits.
During a trip to Kentucky in 1851, Fowler painted Mrs. Robinson, wife of the governor, and, hence, First Lady of Kentucky. Several signature Fowler conventions appear in this work: a warm, slightly flushed coloration, a delicate line defining anatomical contouring and modeling, offset by the rather graceful flowing scarf and still-life detail.
