About this work
**Young Mr. Faul** arrests the eye with the directness Maentel brought to every subject, however small the canvas. Executed in watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper — measuring approximately 15⅞ by 10⅞ inches — and dated to 1835–1838, the portrait is set in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The work belongs to the mature phase of Maentel's full-length portraiture, in which pairs of frontal figures placed into colorful interiors had become his typical presentation by the mid-1820s. The young Mr. Faul — a boy on the cusp of social legibility, dressed in the manner of his Pennsylvania German community — is rendered with all of Maentel's characteristic forensic care: portraits notable for their detailing of faces, dress, and backgrounds, with fine and distinct ink strokes delineating brows and lashes, while heavier washes indicate drapery and landscape elements.
The painting was made in Lancaster in the mid- to late 1830s — a pivotal transitional moment in Maentel's life. In 1836, Maentel and his family began a westward journey to Texas, which was a magnet for many Pennsylvania German immigrants.
Around this time, Maentel decided to move his family there, but illness interrupted the journey, and the family settled in the former utopian community of New Harmony, Indiana. *Young Mr. Faul*, painted on the eve of this rupture, is among the last of his Lancaster-period portraits — a farewell, in some sense, to the tightly knit community he had spent three decades recording. His full-length likenesses of individuals in interiors are valued today as documentation of the local community's distinctive style of domestic furnishing and decoration, notably the painted, stenciled, or applied preprinted patterns that enlivened their rural, middle-class parlors. The portrait's auction pedigree confirms its standing: it sold for $161,000 at Sotheby's New York — well above its $30,000 to $50,000 estimate — as part of the landmark Ralph Esmerian collection sale in 2014.
As a fine art print, *Young Mr. Faul* suits rooms that reward close looking — a study or reading room with warm natural light, a hallway where the eye lingers, or grouped as part of a folk art arrangement alongside other early American works. Maentel's itinerant portraits recorded the prosperous farmers and tradesmen of Pennsylvania and Indiana with a specificity that keeps them alive across centuries. The viewer drawn to social history, to the archive-as-art, or simply to the strange, steady gaze of a long-ago child will find this portrait quietly riveting
