Father and Son by Budington, Jonathan

This is Jonathan Budington's "Father and Son," painted around 1800. It is a folk portrait from the earliest years of the American republic, now held by the National Gallery of Art. Budington was a self-taught provincial painter working outside academic conventions, and here he created a family record whose power is not in display but in restraint.

The father's eyes slip just past us. The boy faces forward, pale and round-cheeked but wearing the gravity of a small adult. Their matching white linen, his cravat, the child's wide ruffled collar, visually rhymes them across the canvas. But the painting's true fulcrum is at center: two hands layered over a book, the only place their bodies touch. In a canvas built on averted gazes, that joined point is where the affection lives.

Painted in 1800, the portrait reflects a Federal-era ideal of fatherhood. Boys of respectable families were dressed as miniature gentlemen and shown with the tools of educated patrimony, here, a book held between them. The bond was real; the expression was formal. Budington caught both.

What do you see in the distance between those two faces?