Sorting Family, Faces, and Misattributions
A painting now widely identified as William H. Machen’s mother is almost certainly not his mother.
But the identification does not hold up. It is known through family lore rather than documented attribution.
My research on Machen over the past 17 years, including work with his descendant, James Machen made me think that this painting could not possibly be Machen’s mother, since she died at the age of 48. If left unexamined, misattributions like this reshape the historical record–quietly but permanently.
The painting shows an elderly woman: the lengthened upper lip, the deep folds around the mouth, the softened jawline. These are not the features of a woman in her forties. In a known portrait of Agatha Kuyk Machen, she appears to be in her prime.
The discrepancy is not subtle.
There are other inconsistencies. Machen kept a journal of his paintings from 1852 to 1907, where he carefully documented his work. There was no entry close to being this work in 1872, the year stated in The Blade that it was painted. There is an entry for a copy of the “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (deceased)” that was painted for his son Henry in 1873. But the size was small, 12 x 15.”
And then there is the matter of the inscription in the middle left of the painting. A high-resolution detail of the inscription appears to read “G.B. Kuyk,” suggesting that the painting may not be by Machen at all.
The name points back to Holland, and to Machen’s early artistic training with his uncle, G. Buitendijk Kuijk. Perhaps it depicts his mother, who would be Machen’s grandmother.
There is also a telling detail in the painting’s recent history. In communication with a member of the extended Machen family, it was noted that the work had been kept in an attic for many decades and was known primarily through family lore. That does not diminish its significance—but it does help explain how an identification might have shifted over time. As with many inherited portraits, names can attach gradually, becoming accepted without documentation. In that light, the current attribution may reflect a later assumption rather than a contemporaneous record.
Then the good deed of donating a painting to an important collection backfires.
It is amazing how quickly such a misidentification can harden into certainty — a newspaper feature, then a “google truth.” This post is an attempt to slow that process down.
Hopefully it will get fixed soon where it matters — at the library, in the press, and on google, so this misattribution doesn’t totally get set in stone.
Here, I am gathering what can be documented: portraits of Machen’s relatives, their stories, along with his important paintings documenting Toledo’s history. Seen together, they begin to form a more coherent picture—not just of the artist, but of the visual world he came from.
Echoes of Dutch training carried into an American city still defining itself
Machen’s journal of his paintings is now held in the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library. It is a rare and invaluable record. It gives us a framework against which new attributions can be tested—not simply accepted. In it, 2,545 paintings are listed from 1852 t0 1907, with a note by his grandson who donated the journal that states there are more paintings that are not listed. Machen died in 1911.
The portrait now circulating as his mother may yet find its proper place. But for now, it raises a useful question:
Not just who is this woman?
But how do we know who we are looking at?
What follows is a working archive—Machen and his folks, as best as they can be known.
The Machen family came to America, to Toledo, being French Catholic refugees escaping France to Germany to Holland — first, escaping the guillotine in France at the height of the French Revolution in 1793. Second, in 1847, leaving Holland for Ohio, when the two Machen brothers, Augustine and Henry left with their families for reasons of religious freedom after the Dutch government forced Catholics to join the Dutch Reformed Church.
Documented work by William H. Machen, representative of his known style and subject matter in Toledo:
