New Light: Blyth Spirits - The Magazine Antiques
New Light: Blyth Spirits Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. In 2005 the Maine auction house F. O. Bailey Antiquarians offered a late eighteenth-century oil portrait of Nancy Bezoil Lane and her daughter Betsy as a painting “in the manner of Joseph Badger.” Marvin Sadik—by then an art dealer, but formerly the director of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC—bought it with a winning bid of $32,480. He had recognized the portrait as the work of the Salem, Massachusetts, artist Benjamin Blyth, an attribution based on the painting’s subject, its composition, its chara...
Source: themagazineantiques.com