Jacob Guptil Fletcher

Who was Jacob Guptil Fletcher?

Jacob Guptil Fletcher was an American artist and art conservator.

Born in Maine, Fletcher was a clerk in Boston in the 1850s and identified himself as an artist after 1860. He lived in Boston, Portland, Maine, and Columbus, Ohio before moving to Washington, D.C. in the 1880s. He reportedly had a studio in the Corcoran Gallery up until 1890. He advertised his services in Columbus as a portrait painter "from Life or from Photographs; Old Paintings cleaned, repaired and varnished".

He exhibited at the Boston Athenæum in 1858 and 1874. In 1875 Fletcher exhibited two works at the Cincinnati Industrial Exposition. His painting Still Life with Vase & Grapes was sold at Christie's in New York in 1998 for $3,680.

Fletcher was primarily a portrait painter, and his portraits of Kent Bunting, Nicholas Emery and Paul Ansel Chadbourne were in the collection of Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. The Emery portrait was destroyed in the 1914 fire at the academy. Whereabouts of the Chadbourne portrait are unknown.