Beardsley limner

One of several but unidentified portrait painters active in New England and New York in the several decades following the American Revolution, the name derives from two of the earliest-known portraits whose subjects were Hezekiah and Elizabeth Davis Beardsley. Scholars have linked fifteen portraits under the name of Beardsley Limner, all completed from 1785 to the early 19th century. Subjects lived along the Boston Post Road in Massachusetts and Connecticut and appear to be prosperous but not upper-class aristocrats. Something of the life of this painter(s) can be found by tracing the history of the subjects. Source: Christine Skeeles Schloss, Essay in "American Folk Painters of Three Centuries" by Jean Lipman and Tom Armstrong.