Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886), A Rare Bronze Portrait Medallion Of George Washington (1732-1799)

Dated, "1852"

inscribed "H.K. Brown/ Sculptor/ June 1852."

Diameter 9 3/4 inches.

Provenance:

A Midwest collection.

Literature:

Thayer Tolles and Thomas B. Smith, The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925 (Metropolitan Museum of Art: New York, 2013), pgs. 150-151.

Note:

It is probable that Brown cast this example himself, considering the high level of finishing and the fact that it is not stamped with a foundry mark. He was one of the first American sculptors to cast bronze in the United States.

with a nice dark patination, having some mild rubbing to face; with some light scratches present, to lower face, forehead, and neck, and with some scratches to medallion, particularly along edges; a couple minute knicks along edge; a solder repair visible to backside- behind base of ponytail

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Lynda Cain

VP, Head of Department, American Furniture, Folk and Decorative Arts

[email protected]267.414.1237

Lynda Cain serves as a Vice President of Freeman's and is the Head of Department for American Furniture, Folk and Decorative Arts.
She specializes in American furniture and decorative arts, Native American art, American folk art, and Pennsylvania furniture and decorative arts.
Cain joined Freeman's in 2001 as the company's first American furniture and decorative arts specialist. She began her career in American Decorative Arts as assistant curator at the Detroit Historical Museum. In 1984 she became curator of costume at the Detroit Historical Museum. In 1986, she relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts and switched from museum work when she joined the American Furniture and Decorative Art Department at Skinner Inc., Bolton and Boston, Massachusetts. Before leaving New England in 1997, she had the great pleasure of directing the cataloguing project of the Folk Art Collection of Nine Fletcher and Bertram K. Little at Cogswell’s Grant, Essex, Massachusetts for the Society of the Preservation of New England Antiquities, now Historic New England. Ms. Cain joined the cast of the popular PBS series Antiques Roadshow in Season 19.
Growing up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, she was greatly influenced by the rich collections of American paintings, furniture, and decorative arts held by Greenfield Village and the Henry Ford Museum. She notes her good fortune of working in our two great “attic states:” Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Each Commonwealth has tremendous inventory of historic material, great institutions, and citizens who treasure their inherited and collected items. Cain appears on the television Antiques Roadshow as an appraiser of decorative and folk arts.

American Furniture, Folk and Decorative Arts

Henry Kirke Brown (1814-1886), A Rare Bronze Portrait Medallion Of George Washington (1732-1799)

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