Ammi Phillips (1788–1865): The Quiet Genius of American Folk Art Ammi Phillips (April 24, 1788 – July 11, 1865) was a prolific American itinerant portrait painter active from the mid 1810s to the early 1860s in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New York. His artwork is identified as folk art, primitive art, provincial art, and itinerant art without consensus among scholars, pointing to the enigmatic nature of his work and life. He is attributed to over eight hundred paintings, although only eleven are signed. While his paintings are formulaic in nature, Phillips’s work was under constant const…