John Wood Dodge was largely a self-taught artist who apprenticed to a sign painter at 16. From humble beginnings, he grew to receive national acclaim as a miniaturist and dioramist and, in 1832, was elected as an associate member of the National Academy of Design. His 1842 portrait miniature of Gen. Jackson was engraved for the postage stamp of 1863.

The following notes are extracted from "John Wood Dodge: and the portrait miniature" Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2003  by Raymond White, D. 733

Dodge was born into a middle-class family in New York City on November 4, 1807. At about the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to a sign painter in whose shop his work included painting tinned cans. Dodge, his fellow workers, and his family quickly recognized that he had considerable artistic ability and encouraged him to develop his talent. Dodge seems to have taught himself, first by copying borrowed paintings and then, during the winter of 1826-1827, by drawing from casts and statuary in the collection of the National Academy of Design in New York City.

He quickly found portrait miniatures on ivory to be his metier, and his progress in the field was remarkable. By 1828 he was painting reasonably competent portraits; in 1829 he first exhibited at the National Academy of Design; and in 1832 he was elected an associate of the academy. In the early 1830s William Dunlap wrote that Dodge "stands among the prominent professors of the art [of painting portrait miniatures] in New York."

Portrait miniatures were not made to be hung on a wall, to be gawked at by the merely curious, as were large portraits. In virtually every case the miniature was painted to be given as a bond between the subject and the recipient. Dodge began to work in the midst of a major change in the technique, and, some feel, in the meaning of portrait miniatures. In the mid-eighteenth century these paintings were small, and the emphasis was on delicate coloring and flattering likenesses. As the century ended, the miniature grew larger (generally 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 inches high), coloration became bolder, backgrounds tended to be darker, and likenesses became more realistic.

Dodge's miniatures are in the larger size, they tend to have the bolder coloring, and his normal background is relatively dark. However, the pink cloud background that he sometimes used has a delicacy that would have pleased an eighteenth-century miniaturist. His work was almost always meant to have the quality of a personal token, rather than that of an object for public display.

In addition to being an artist of fine sensibility, Dodge was also a craftsman, and he obviously had vowed early in his career never to be guilty of poor workmanship. With a few exceptions, his portraits, all carefully and smoothly painted, fall into two types. The first type is painted from just off center, usually with the subject looking slightly to the right, and with a greenish-gray background that varies from light to moderately dark. Virtually every one of these has a shadowlike smudge at the lower right. The second type has a background of pink-tinted clouds and sometimes includes furnishings, a landscape, or architectural features, as well as different poses.

Dodge practiced successfully in New York City until the late 1830s, when his health appeared to be deteriorating and his doctor gave him the common prescription of moving to the South. In 1838 Dodge traveled to Huntsville, Alabama, where, after a somewhat slow start, he had a successful season of painting. After the season he returned to New York, but was back in Huntsville the next year.

Although business had been good in Huntsville, Dodge concluded there was no long-term future there because the city was too small. By May 1840 he had moved to Nashville, and from the beginning he enjoyed a successful stay in Tennessee. Nashville newspapers not only carried advertisements announcing his arrival, but also published articles praising his work and recommending him highly. Perhaps his most remarkable client was the estate of Robert Woods, a prominent and wealthy Nashville banker. Woods left instructions in his will that twenty-four miniatures of him be painted--one for each of his twenty-four nieces--and Dodge got the contract. It took him about six months to do the work, and he charged $940 for the pictures without cases.

Dodge became prosperous enough to purchase five thousand acres a few miles west of Crossville near present-day Pomona in Cumberland County, Tennessee, where he established a huge orchard that is said to have con sisted of eighty-two thousand apple trees. The Pomona Fruit Ranch soon became the principal residence of the Dodges and five of their children. Dodge's brother William and his family also moved to Pomona.

Another brother, Edward Samuel Dodge, was a capable portrait miniature painter in his own right, as his portrait of Mrs. Matthew Vassar Jr. shows. He suffered from tuberculosis, and, as his health began to fail, he made a last effort at a cure by giving up painting and repairing to his brother's property at Pomona for the pure mountain air. However; his disease was so advanced that he died shortly after his arrival, and he, like his brother John, is buried on the Cumberland Plateau. Dodge regularly painted members of his family, and his portrait of Edward is a particularly handsome example.

In order to pay for the plateau property, Dodge had to keep painting. Entries in his account book show that he could turn out a miniature in three days of concentrated effort. Dodge's prices were high--$50 to $100 was his normal price range--and some miniatures cost as much as $250. Occasionally he painted miniatures for barter. Many of Dodge's subjects were prominent, and nearly all were wealthy. To increase his income, Dodge had engravings made of some of his portrait miniatures and sold them nationwide. His most popular engraved portraits were of Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay (1777-1852).

Dodge's miniature of Jackson, painted in 1842, met with instant approval. He painted it for his own use and took it to Washington for exhibition at the Library of Congress and then on to New York City, where he had it engraved by Moseley Isaac Danforth (1800-1862). This engraving was used as the basis for the United States two-cent "Black Jack" postage stamp issued in 1863, and for the five-dollar note issued by the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Cecil County, Maryland, in 1863, and it was probably pirated for other uses as well. In addition to the portrait from which the engraving was made, Dodge painted a number of smaller portraits of Jackson for Jackson's admirers.

Two of Dodge's miniatures are of special interest, although the whereabouts of both are not known today. The first is that of a "Cold woman Ann", which he painted for twenty dollars, an unusually low price. This is the only miniature he is known to have painted of a black person, and one of few known by any artist. It was not painted in Nashville, as might have been expected, but in New York City on December 15, 1842, according to an entry in the artist's account book. The second portrait of particular interest is of "Mrs. Dr. Lindsley," the wife of the Reverend Dr: Philip Lindsley, painted on April 1, 1846. It is the first of his works to bear the note that it was painted from a daguerreotype, a circumstance that became more and more common as the years passed, according to annotations in Dodge's account book.

Even with his many commissions in Middle Tennessee, Dodge regularly traveled to other cities in search of clients. He is known to have worked in Natchez, Mississippi (December 1848-April 1850), Saint Louis (June 1854-November 1855), Harrodsburg Springs (now Harrodsburg), Kentucky (July 1841), Lexington (June 1843 and September 9-November 9, 1843), New Orleans (February 19-May 19, 1848), Louisville (July 15-September 25, 1848), Memphis (December 17, 1847-February 1848), and New York City (November 9, 1842-March 11, 1843, July 1843, and January 22, 1844-early November 1844).

Dodge's attention to quality extended to the fruit grown on his ranch, which won him a silver cup (see Pl. XIV). The Dodge family's assets were largely invested in the five-thousand-acre ranch, and the family's forced removal to the North after the beginning of the Civil War left them in considerably reduced financial circumstances. The strain of the loss of income and the cost of having to set up housekeeping again was compounded by the fact that the portrait business was slow. From the late 1840s customers increasingly turned from painted miniatures to photographs.

During his later years in the North, Dodge painted portrait miniatures of his usual high quality when he found commissions, but most of his work was taking photographs. He also produced a number of oil portraits of famous people, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. (see pictures) He painted these from life and also copied existing portraits and then sold prints or photographs after them. In spite of all of this effort, Dodge was not making a handsome living.

About 1870, the Dodge family moved to Chicago, where the artist established a place for himself in the fields of art and photography that allowed him to support his family for almost twenty years. In 1889 the Dodges at last returned to the Pomona ranch. During his final years Dodge continued to paint occasional portrait miniatures and full-sized portraits.

On December 15, 1893, Dodge died of pneumonia at the age of eighty-six. He and other members of his family are buried in a neat row at the crest of a hill in Oaklawn Cemetery in Pomona, for which he had given the land to the community some forty years earlier. Dodge's modest headstone gives no hint that an accomplished American artist lies buried there.