Look-alikes

In perusing our article “Art Out of the Attic” in the December, 1971, issue, a number of alert readers recognized the painting of the ruins of Fort Ticonderoga by an unknown artist as copied from a print by W. H. Bartlett. Bartlett (1809-54) was a noted English landscape painter who visited America four times between 1836 and 1852 and published a series of prints of upstate New York views.

In similar fashion a source has turned up for Grandma Knitting in Her Rocking Chair , painted by an anonymous inmate at Dannemora Prison. Vivien and Ronald Lowden, of Narberth, Pennsylvania, collectors of stereoscopic view cards, believe the painting was modelled after a photographic portrait taken in 1870 and published in an album by F. G. Weller, of Littleton, New Hampshire. Weller, the Lowdens point out, often posed members of his family in humorous scenes like this.