Born in Philadelphia to French Catholic parents, John F. Francis achieved considerable success as a portrait painter before turning to the still-life subjects for which he is best remembered today. The artist’s early life remains a mystery. He appears to have been orphaned at an early age and nothing is known about how he came to a career in art. Philadelphia, of course, boasted a distinguished art tradition in a relatively circumscribed world. As a young man with a talent for drawing, Francis could readily have seen the work of Charles Willson Peale (1741–1827) and other members of Peale’s extended painting family, including still-life painters James, Raphael, and Rembrandt Peale. He certainly encountered the omnipresent works of his contemporary (albeit a generation older), Thomas Sully (1783–1872), whose romantic portraits delighted Philadelphia patrons for decades.
By 1832, Francis was painting reputable portraits of Pennsylvania gentry in a style that reflected the prevailing Sully influence. As a young itinerant portraitist, Francis toured through towns of central Pennsylvania, his stops documented by known works. He painted in Pottsville, Sunbury, Lewisburg, Bellefonte, and Milton, traveling as far south as Nashville, Tennessee, and west to Chilicothee, Ohio. He spent a considerable time in the neighborhood of the state capital, Harrisburg, returning there periodically to paint various patrons including four governors of Pennsylvania, as well as numerous other prominent citizens. When Francis finally stopped traveling, he settled near Philadelphia, first in Phoenixville (21 miles northwest of the city on the Schuylkill River), and then in Jeffersonville (near Norristown). By the time that Francis went to Jeffersonville, around 1858, he may have been living alone. The artist married young and had two children; a son, Joseph Raphael, born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, in 1833, and a daughter, Mary Elizabeth, born in New Berlin, Pennsylvania, in 1834. In 1856, both children, by then young adults, were victims of a cholera epidemic. Francis’s wife, Mary, died a few years later. Francis lived the last two decades of his life in Jeffersonville and is buried there.
Despite a highly successful career, Francis, like many other notable American 19th-century artists, fell into obscurity after his death. Wolfgang Born, in his seminal 1947 study, Still-Life Painting in America, resurrected Francis (pp. 23–24), praised him highly, and illustrated seven of his works (figs. 54–60) while noting the “meager sources available” to shed light on the artist’s life. To Alfred Frankenstein goes the lion’s share of credit for expanding our knowledge of Francis’s footprint. In preparation for his 1953 book on American still-life painting, After the Hunt, Frankenstein unearthed considerable biographical evidence, including finding surviving relatives of the artist. He first published his findings in an article, “J. F. Francis,” in The Magazine Antiques ([May 1951], pp. 374–77, 390), to which he appended the artist’s own partial inventory of his portrait work which Frankenstein had located in the possession of Francis’s niece. In 1981, William Gerdts appreciated Francis at some length in Painters of the Humble Truth: Masterpieces of American Still Life, 1801–1939, noting that “of all the mid-century still-life specialists, Francis is the most ‘painterly’....There is often a freshness and a brio to his paint application that successfully balances his sure delineation of form and his establishment of texture” (p. 92).
