Biography from AskART:
| The following is from the "Cape Cod Times", August 13, 2003.
In North Truro during the the wintry bite of January 14, 1841, Isaac Small, a peppy young sailor of 22, paid $10 to G.H. Ballou to have his portrait painted. We know of this exchange because the original receipt was found still fastened to the commissioned painting.
Ballou was a sallow 20 when he painted it, and Small's coy demeanor has an almost folklike quality under the young artist's brush. The addition of a subtly irreverent smirk to the subject, however, creates an amusing moment between two benign miscreants engaged in the youthful follies of commerce and preservation.
Giddings Hyde Ballou - itinerant painter - perhaps never would have registered as even a blip to 19th-century American portraiture but for the academic curiosity and sleuthing of Ellen St. Sure. She followed a scant trail through libraries and museums, census and tax records, tracing migratory family histories in an effort to reveal the artist and those he painted.
Some seven years later, she managed to compile a concise history of Ballou's life as well as uncovering and identifying 26 of his portraits. Not an easy task, considering he never signed his work, but St. Sure's perseverance had paid dividends with Ballou's return to his most benevolent town, Brewster.
Twenty-four of those paintings are on display at Brewster Ladies' Library through Sept. 6, 2003 along with St. Sure's documentation of an early Brewster full of "sea captains' money" and society women.
During an unrelated research project, St. Sure, a retired professor, first came across references to a "Mr. Ballou" from a memoir by library principal founder Augusta Mayo.
"Mr. Ballou, a portrait painter from Medford ... was an invalid," she wrote, and "the community were glad to have the advantages of his society." After his arrival in the village of Brewster in 1847, Ballou boarded with the family of lawyer George Copeland at what is now the Candleberry Inn. For at least six years, he ingratiated himself with Brewster society, painting its residents and extending his commissions to Chatham and outlying communities.
All of this would be no more than a fascinating academic field trip if not for the fact that several of the paintings are extraordinary, independent of their personal histories and nebulous ties to Cape citizenry.
Six years after painting the Isaac Small portrait, Ballou returned to the Cape with a far more perceptive eye and sophisticated manner. There's no evidence he had any formal training, but with a first-class education Ballou most likely learned by mimicking the masters. Although you can see traces of his shortcomings - hands, for example, sometimes appear less refined or awkwardly disproportionate - at some point he outstripped these irregularities to produce vivid and quietly stunning windows into early Brewster and its inhabitants.
The "Portrait of Sarah Emeline Knowles" is a fine example. She died at 17, and Ballou holds her in the final bloom of her youth, confidently poised on the threshold of womanhood. Even in the reproduction on display - its owner couldn't bear the separation - it's a haunting image.
By achieving a stark simplicity and focusing on the mask of personality, Ballou sneaks around the corners of a sitter's pretensions. He reveals the meek earnestness of Sarah's older brother Josiah Nickerson Knowles, or their mother Sally's weary affectation of hardships, while the Copeland family's daughter, Mary Ann, fixes you with the gaze of an otherworldly ingenue.
Eventually Ballou fell victim to the invention of photography. "By the time he was in full flower," says St. Sure, "so was daguerreotype. There were daguerreotype studios even on Cape Cod, and within five or six years they essentially wiped out the portrait artist business."
Work dried up, and by the fall of 1850 he was placing ads in the Yarmouth Register and Barnstable Patriot indicating he was prepared to make portraits from daguerreotypes.
Although he always would identify himself as a portrait painter, Ballou eventually had to make a living as a schoolteacher and free-lance journalist. He was a correspondent for a Universalist paper during the Civil War and lived for a time in the nation's capital, but he eventually returned to Cape Cod to marry a sea captain's widow and spend the final quarter of his life in Chatham.
When he died in 1886 at the age of 65, his reputation and career as a portrait artist were buried along with him. Because of St. Sure's efforts, Ballou has taken up residence in Brewster once again.
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The following is from Peter Falk, "Who Was Who in American Art"
Giddings Ballou was born in Chatham, Massachusetts. His father was at one time President of Tufts College. During the Civil War, he edited the "Gospel Banner", and after the war was in Washington DC for eight years as an employee of the Agricultural Bureau. |
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