Customer Reviews

Dictionary of American Portraits

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I have had a copy of this book in my research library since 1970. Through it I have identified important nineteenth century people in photographs that I either own or have seen in other collections. I had just about worn the book out over forty years. What a thrill to get an excellent used copy for an incredibly small price. I LOVE AMAZON USED BOOKS!!! Every experience I have had has exceeded my greatest expectations.

I grew up with this volume and loved it. I would have given it a solid five stars, but recently I looked up Scott Joplin in order to see which picture they chose. He was not in the volume. I consider Joplin a great American composer and was flabbergasted to find him absent. The book is replete with Native American entries and perhaps that had clouded my vision about how inclusive the book is. I then decided to search the book for African American entries. Here is what I found: Of the more than 4000 entries in the book there are exactly 8 for African Americans. Even for 1967, when this book was published, this is shameful. Aside from this the book is excellent.

This is a very valuable portrait dictionary and a helpful resource for doing research in American history.

Yes, it is incomplete in the representation of African-American, Asian-American, Native-American, American women, Spanish-American, etc... The truth is, this encyclopedia could easily contain 10,000 names and would not be considered complete.

If this glass is an half-full one, then let me fill it up a bit with my amateur suggestions!

Among the MIAs are:

Cesar Chelor (c. 1720-1784) Planemaker, Slave and Freeman of Wrentham, Massachusetts. Mr Chelor was a slave who, in about 1736, belonged to colonial entrepreneur and earliest documented American planemaker, Francis Nicholson (1683-1753). Chelor was Nicholson's apprentice and later became a planemaker in his own right. When Nicholson died in 1753, he willed Chelor his freedom, a workshop, and the tools and material to continue on independently. In 1758 he married Judith Russell and they had eight children. Look up Chelor's inprint "C.E. Chelor, Living in Wrentham." in A Guide to the Makers of American Wooden Planes. He died without a will in 1784 with an estate inventory valued at 88 pounds 2 shillings. Chelor has the distinction in being the earliest documented African American toolmaker in North America. Cesar Chelor and the world he lived in

Spencer Trask (1844-1909), the venture capitalist who financed and therefore founded General Electric in 1879 with Thomas A Edison and also lead the funding rally for The New York Times' purchase in 1896. See The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times.

His wife Katrina (Nicholls) Trask (1853-1922) was a socialite, philantropist, noted arts patron and poet from the Golden Age who published some 20 books during her lifetime such as The Little Town of Bethlehem: A Play for the Christmastide in Three Parts. The Trasks willed Yaddo, their Saratoga Springs mansion and a trust to create the well known Yaddo Artist Colony.

Leonard Bailey (1825-1905), a prolific tool and machinery inventor, designer and manufacturer to whom we owe about 60 Patents that revolutionized most of the hand-tools we are using today. Suggested readings: Patented Transitional and Metallic Planes in America, 1827-1927 (Vol. I).

Henry Chapman Mercer (1856-1930), a Doylestown PA lifelong resident dedicated his brilliant mind to American Prehistoric Archeology. He also collected more than 250,000 objects of America's daily use that we now call "Americana". In 1915, he built the Mercer Museum to house this amazing collection. Do read his 1931 magnum opus, Ancient Carpenters' Tools: Together with Lumbermen's, Joiners' and Cabinet Makers' Tools in Use in the Eighteenth Century.

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885-1968) was a prodigiously talented and gifted painter who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, from 1902 to 1909. For several years Sparhawk-Jones apprenticed with the American artist William Merritt Chase (1848-1916)

Elizabeth Ames (1885-1976), who between 1924 and 1969 shaped American Culture as the brilliant Executive Director of Yaddo, the Artist Colony in Saratoga Springs NY. read about her in Creative Power: Yaddo and the Making American Culture.

Jacobus Barhyte (1765-1842) Revolutionary soldier and an important Founder of Saratoga Springs, NY. Read Yaddo, yesterday and today...

There are numerous other volumes to compensate for the missing in action in this book! There is Encyclopedia Of Black America (Da Capo Paperback) to address the forgotten African-Americans...

There is also Nancy Khul's Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts...

and the upcoming Rourke's Native American History & Culture Encyclopedia (10 Volumes), and so on, and so on...!