I saw this the other day on one of my favorite blogs, American Folk Art @ Cooperstown, which serves up great American folk art and the stories behind it on a regular basis. Paul D’Ambrosio, who writes this blog and is an authority on folk art, featured this wonderful protrait from the early 1800’s, probably from eastern New York state where the painter Ammi Phillips plied his trade.
Having your portrait painted at that time was the only way that one’s image might ever be recorded and therefore took on a great importance, the sitter wanting to give a full accounting of who they were. It was not unusual to display evidence of your trade, to show the tools that enabled the sitter to afford the luxury of such a painting. But I doubt that many went quite as far as this man.
He is obviously a doctor. Well, at least I hope he’s a doctor because I really wouldn’t be comfortable if I were the man whose eye is being held open if he were, say, a carpenter. This appears to be a doctor about to perform cataract surgery. You wouldn’t think so but this surgery, in different forms, has been around since well before the time of Christ, as early as the 6th century BC. It’s one of those things thqat makes me very thankful for the time in which I live, for all its flaws.
It’s a portrait that makes you wonder about the lives of the people in it, which I think makes it a great portrait. It has an oddball quality as well that transcends mere portraiture. Just a wonderful and strange piece of Americana. If you wish to know more about the world of American folk art, check in at the American Folk Art blog. It is a treasure chest of information and stories,
Redtree Times 
You certainly don’t see many portraits with three eyes and three hands.
Exactly!