Artists who painted Amenia

Recently my neighbor Ann Phillips dropped by and left me some maps, pictures and a book titled “Ammi Phillips, Portrait Painter 1788-1865” (i.e. not a relative of husband George, or the Bill Phillips family, she noted). During his lifetime he lived in and out of Amenia and the Tri-​state area. The movement of his family when he was a youth, and then his similar lifestyle, was so full that research of his life and work: “has all the excitement of a well-​organized detective story,” said Mary Black in her preface, in the 1969 copyright edition, as titled above, for the Museum of American Folk Art in New York City. This book was the first to be published by the museum, added Black, and was done specifically for an exhibit of Phillips’ works held there in 1968 (CN Potter, Inc/Publisher, N.Y., 1968). His style of painting, a style of the era and the area, was called Limner and in the early 1800s was more definitively described as Border Limner. He painted some Amenia folks. It’s a great story and the Amenia Historical Society (AHS) has a file. He’s buried in the Amenia Island Cemetery. Another painter who lived and worked out of our town was Walter Hartson. He was born in 1866 in Iowa and came to Amenia in and around the 1920s, buying a house in Wassaic right across from the Deister family on Firehouse Road and its intersect with Old Route 22/County Route 81. Hartson had studied art and had won recognition by various groups over the years both in eastern USA and Holland. As a resident of Dutchess County he painted many of the county’s landscapes (AHS archives). Joyce Ghee and Joan Spence have a picture, in their Harlem Valley Pathways Book published by Arcadia in 1998, of a painting he did of the William Bates Farm on Deep Hollow Road in the 1930s. A Google search brought me to auction results for a painting he did titled, “A Back Road — ​Wassaic, New York.” It sold for $6,600. He died in 1946. • • •Tilly Strauss, a whimsical painter/artist, as she is known in her blog (tillystudio.blogspot.com), spent some years in Amenia as the centuries went from the 1900s into the 2000s to 2010s. During that time she worked closely with Ann Linden and AHS, including the year 2004’s town celebration of its 300th anniversary. That year they guided the work of Kildonan School students in the painting of eight award-winning murals for that event. Postcards of those murals are still available from AHS. Tilly is really Elizabeth and was formally educated in both fine art and art history in Colorado. She has exhibited in both local and national galleries and is inspired by the chicken, she said in her online statement. That inspiration served her really well here in Amenia when she worked with Ann Linden, who also “connects with the chicken.” Today in the Amenia Town Hall on Route 22, the original site of the Amenia Seminary from 1835-1888 that included drawing and painting in its curriculum, you will find art work on display on the first floor. It is there courtesy of Harlem Valley Arts; it is changed periodically and is further known as ART from the HEART. Enjoy!Arlene Iuliano is the Amenia town historian.