American Art Collaborative

Although he was an accomplished portraitist, Elliott had received little formal training apart from six months in 1829 spent in the studio of John Quidor (1801-81), who had broken with the traditional realism prevailing in the first half of the 19th century to produce highly fanciful scenes taken from the literature of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. In this scene, Elliott appears to acknowledge his indebtedness to Quidor who, by then, had been almost completely forgotten by the public. In this work, Elliott had depicted the rotund Anthony Van Corlear, who won "prodigious favor in the eyes of the women by means of his whiskers and his trumpet." This scene is taken from Washington Irving's "Diederich Knickerboker's, A History of New York," (1809).