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 Adna Tenney (1810 - 1900)
Born at Hanover (NH); died at Oberlin (OH).
Farmer, itinerant portrait painter.
Portrait by unknown artist, possibly H.S. Putnam.
Presented to the State, 1922.
Adna Tenney was a farmer until 1844, when he went to Boston (MA) to study with the artist Francis Alexander. He then became an itinerant portrait artist, who was in Concord (NH) in 1845 and again in 1872. In between his New Hampshire appearances Tenney worked at New York City, Baltimore (MD), along the Mississippi River (c. 1856), and at Winona (MN) and at Oberlin (OH), where he died, August 10, 1900. George Waldo Browne (see "References", below) said:
This artist had native powers of a high order, and his work showed firmness and originally of handling.
Tenney painted thirty of the State House portraits, as well as others found elsewhere. His own portrait was donated to the State by Henry Tenney, who said the artist was Haldemand S. Putnam (1835 - 1863). Putnam was educated at Cornish (NH), but he entered the U.S. Military Academy in 1851 and pursued a military career until his death during the 1863 effort by the Seventh NH Volunteers to capture Fort Wagner (SC) during the Civil War. If Putnam painted this portrait, therefore, it must have been before 1851, when Tenney was approaching forty years of age. (Putnam would have been a teenager.)
References: "Art and Artists in Manchester, [George Waldo Browne, ed., Manchester Historic Association Collections, vol. IV, 1908 - 1910 (1910, reprint 1992).]; Peter Hastings Falk, Who Was Who in American Art (1985).
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Concord NH 03301-3570 
