Attributed to Aaron Dean Fletcher (American, 1817-1902), "Jonathan Whipple (born July 7, 1795)" and his wife "Melinda Grout Whipple ( married September 10-15, 1820)", a pair of portraits, c. 1840, oil on canvas, unsigned, each 27 in. x 22 in., in matching naive-style frames E7000-10000 Provenance: Acquired directly from the descendants of John Adams Whipple (1822-1891) of Grafton, MA, the celebrated pioneer of American photography, son of the sitters. Frames from Heydenryck Gallery, New York, by whom acquired from the collection of Edgar and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch. Note: These fine itinerant-artist portraits are evidently the work of Aaron Dean Fletcher, a Vermont painter whose career began around 1837, who worked also in New York and Massachusetts (where these canvases would have been painted in the town of Grafton, in which the Whipple family were residents for generations). Such an attribution to Fletcher was suggested for these impressive likenesses some years ago, by the staff of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center at Colonial Williamsburg, on the basis of their strong resemblance to certain of the twenty signed or securely attributed works assembled in a monograph article by Virginia M. Burdick and Nancy C. Muller, "Aaron Dean Fletcher, Portrait Painter," in The Magazine Antiques, 115:1 (January 1979), pp. 184-193. That attribution is indeed eminently plausible, especially on the grounds of "Jonathan Whipple's" relationship in pose and physiognomy to Fletcher's portrait of "Samuel Cook" of 1843, and "Melinda Whipple's" correspondences of silhouette and costume with the artist's "Lady with a Cameo Brooch," of 1858. That latter painting, in fact (at 30 in. x 25 in.), shares precisely the same proportions as these canvases, with its addition of three inches in both dimensions; other pairs of Fletcher portraits with sizes (and apparent dates) even closer to these, measure respectively 27 in. x 24 in. (his "Moses and Mary Chase" portraits of c. 1837), or 26 in. x 24 in., or-on a single canvas, again of c. 1837, of the Chase's son-24 in. x 21 in. Thus in terms of the artist's preferred ratios of canvas sizes, in addition to consistently shared elements of formal composition and painterly handling, as well as the use of ornament and color, these highly expressive and appealing portraits may be recognized as fully characteristic and exceptionally noteworthy additions to Fletcher's considerable oeuvre.