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Ammi Phillips (April 24, 1788 – July 11, 1865) was a prolific American portrait painter active in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York for five decades. His artwork is identified as folk art, primitive art, provincial art, and itinerant art without consensus, pointing to the enigmatic nature of his work and life. His paintings hung mostly unidentified, spare for some recognition in the collections like those of Edward Duff Balken, for decades until his oeuvre was reconstructed by Barbara Holdridge and Larry Holdridge, collectors and students of American folk art, with the eventual support of Mary Black, art historian, after many friendly arguments and challenges to prove their contention that Phillips was not only the Kent Limner but also the earlier Border Limner.

! The Holdridges' extensive search in three states for Phillips paintings and for biographical details to be found in the Census Bureau and other written records, as well as the fading memories of still-living relatives of the artist and his portrait subjects (from one of whom they learned the pronunciation of the artist's first name, "Amm-eye") was triggered by their purchase in 1958 of one of the very few portraits signed on the reverse by the artist: "George C. Sunderland Painted When at the Age of 21 years by Mr, Ammi, Phillips, In the fall 1840. ! - where to add this section?????

Life and Death
Phillips was born in Colebrook, Connecticut, on April 24, 1788, to Samuel Phillips (1760-1842), a farmer by trade and veteran of the Revolutionary war, and Millea Phillips (1763-1861), as one of eleven children, beginning a life that spanned the period of George Washington's presidency and ending with the American Civil War. Phillips moved out of his family home at some point before 1810, and married Laura Brockway in Nassau, New York on March 18th, 1813. Laura Brockway's family had roots in Sharon, Connecticut. It is in 1811 that the first signed portraits produced by Phillips are identified, meaning he was by then beginning his career as a portrait painter. Ammi Phillips and Lauren (Brockway) Phillips had four sons, Henry, George, William, and Russell Phillips, and one unknown daughter, although the order in which they had them is unclear, and one may not have survived. Laura Brockway died February 2nd, 1830 at the age of 38, and Phillips remarried Jane Ann Caulkins, twenty years his junior, five months later. Jane would have four more children, Anna, Jane, Samuel, and Sarah Phillips. Sarah Phillips would die at the age of four and a half.

Ammi Phillips reported he and his family living in a different residence in every recorded census. In 1820, he reported living in Troy, New York. He sold this property in 1828, moving to a fourty-five acre property in Rhinebeck, New York. This land would be sold in part to its original owner as well as his brother-in-law, as the family moved yet again inside New York to a one acre property in Amenia. In the 1850 census, Phillips is recorded for the first time under the profession of portrait painter, now living in North East, New York. In 1855 he was recorded as "artist", and was reported to be living in New Mariborough, Massachusetts. In 1860 he was in Curtisville, Pennsylvania, and in 1865, he was living in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Phillips died on July 11th, 1865, at his home in Curtisville. He was seventy-eight years and three months old. His body was buried in Amenia, New York. His extensive, continuously evolving body of artwork over a period of five decades would provide posterity with a vast archive of early American self-fashioning.