(b Oyster Bay, NY, ?1707; d ?1752). American painter. He was the son of a Baptist preacher. Only one portrait of a small child (Media, PA, R. F. Cox priv. col., see Foote), dated to the 1730s, is associated with his years in the New York area. In 1741 he moved to Boston, MA, where he painted an ambitious group portrait, Isaac Royall and his Family (1741; Cambridge, MA, Harvard U., Portrait Col.); the composition relies on John Smibert's The Bermuda Group (1729; New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.) as a model, which suggests a degree of contact with the elder artist. Although somewhat stiff and rigid in its palette and freshness, the portrait is the most provocative development in Colonial painting since Smibert's arrival 12 years earlier. From 1742 to 1744 Feke may have been in England or Europe, where he would have been exposed to contemporary developments in painting, but this is unsubstantiated.
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