File talk:Samuel Doak Sr.jpg

Modern copy of contemporary portrait

This picture should not be treated as a historical image. This appears to me to be a naive modern painting showing a very implausible impression of the subject. The body is poorly drawn. The head is encased in a white shroud, perhaps because the artist wasn’t sure whether or not to give the subject a periwig. Instead of a ruffled shirt front, the artist sketched a modern shirt collar and tie with a 20th-century four-in-hand knot. Guessing that this was probably wrong, they seem to have simply stopped painting. The shelf of books is also naively handled, but not in the way that any early 19th-century naive American painter would have handled it. — Alarob (talk)

Update: This appears plainly to be a modern, unfinished, loose copy by an amateur of a historic portrait shown here in the Tennessee Encyclopedia entry for Samuel Doak. — Alarob (talk) 19:05, 29 September 2021 (UTC)

I don't have the expertise to evaluate this claim. FYI - the original source for this image is from Tusculum College here. Unfortunately, neither the college nor the Tennessee Encyclopedia explicitly identify their image.--Mojo Hand (talk) 22:22, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

It does appear that this painting is a modern attempt to interpret the earlier one shown at Tennessee Encyclopedia. Where the earlier one shows a man with white hair covering his ears and adhering pretty closely to the side of his head, the copy misinterprets this as a white hood-like head covering. Also, where the original shows a white neckband tied sort of like a scarf (a simple cravat), the copy (as mentioned) suggests a modern tie. These are interpretive errors by the modern copyist. Therefore it does not represent the subject well. — Alarob (talk) 17:49, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

Might as well add that the breeches worn by the sitter in the copy are not seen in the original, unless the Tennessee Encyclopedia cropped out that detail. While it's possible for an elderly man in the 1820s to have been seen wearing 18th-century-style knee breeches, they would have almost certainly been buckskin yellow or some other light color. Anyway, trousers are more likely. The dark brown knee breeches shown in the copy look more like "knickerbockers" that were fashionable among some American men around 1900, or about 70 years after the sitter's death. — Alarob (talk) 18:47, 23 June 2022 (UTC)

This image from the Tennessee Virtual Archive seems to be an uncropped photograph of some version of this portrait, prob. a better reproduction of the same one shown by the Tennessee Encyclopedia. I found this with an image search but cannot find a linked page with metadata or any other info. So provenance remains a mystery. The image is apparently not discoverable through the Tennessee Virtual Archive search engine — at least, not under Doak's name. — Alarob (talk) 22:45, 24 February 2023 (UTC)