John F. Francis was an active mid-nineteenth-century portrait and still-life painter. He was a reputable Philadelphia portraitist who as early as the mid-1830s had painted Governor Joseph Ritner. In 1851 Francis painted a portrait of James Moore II, the founder of Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Francis’s style was somewhat in the manner of THOMAS SULLY but with a greater focus on personality. He painted many portraits of children. Although most associated with Pennsylvania, living there and exhibiting in the annuals sponsored by the Artists Fund of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he traveled perhaps as far as Ohio to the west and Tennessee to the south in search of commissions. Although he devoted his attention to portraiture in the 1830s and 1840s, thereafter he turned increasingly to still-life paintings, which constitute the bulk of his known oeuvre. His still-life paintings were always tabletop arrangements, usually assembled to suggest an elegant meal of a middle-class household, either luncheon or dessert. Sometimes he presented fruit tumbling out of a simple straw basket. His paintings were characterized by exceptionally soft brushwork, a pastel palette, and concern for form-all formal elements not typical of the period. His last known painting dates from 1879.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alfred Frankenstein, "J. F. Francis," Antiques 59 (May 1951): 374-77, 390, with list of portraits § George L. Hersey, ed., "A Catalogue of Paintings by John F. Francis," Bibliotheca Bucnellensis 14, no. 1 (1958), served as a catalogue of an exhibition held at Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, Penn. § William H. Gerdts and Russell Burke, American Still-Life Painting (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 60-61 § William H. Gerdts, Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801-1939 (copublished by Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, and University of Missouri Press, Columbia, 1981), published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, and others, 1981-82, pp. 89-93 § Lewisburg, Penn., Packwood House Museum, A Suitable Likeness: The Paintings of John F. Francis, 1832-1879, exh. cat., 1986, essay by David W. Dunn, with list of portraits by place.
