An Old Friend Reintroduced

This is one of my favorite folk art paintings of all time, and one that I thought would forever remain a mystery. Back in my grad school days, when i took the American Folk Art course offered by Lou and Aggie Jones here at the Cooperstown Graduate Program, this painting was one that the Joneses love to dwell upon. It's called "The Old Plantation," and it depicts a group of slaves playing music and dancing at an unidentified plantation on a riverbank. It is in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Physical evidence gave some clues to the painting's origins; a watermark on the paper indicated a date of around 1790. The piece was found in an antique shop in South Carolina in the early part of the 20th century. The key question was whether the work was done by a white or a black artist. It certainly looked like a piece done by someone skilled and experienced in watercolor, but there were trained African American artists prior to the American Revolution. The details of the painting, particularly the instruments (which are African or African-inspired) and the nature of the dance itself, seemed to indicate an artist who was intimately familiar with slave culture. To many scholars that seemed enough to lean toward the notion of this having been painted by an artist who was also a slave on this plantation.

Now, owing to careful research, we know that this is not the case at all. Susan P. Shames, a librarian at Colonial Williamsburg, conducted extensive research into period documents, gravestones, and newspapers to identify the artist as John Rose, a plantation owner (and watercolorist) who kept slaves at his riverfront plantation in South Carolina in the 1790s. One key breakthrough had come years ago, in 1976, when a pair of elderly sisters came to Colonial Williamsburg to see the painting and informed staff that the piece had descended in their family and that it was painted by an ancestor of theirs depicting his own plantation. It was Ms. Shames who discovered that one of the ladies' forebears was John Rose.

When I traveled to Williamsburg in the mid-1980s to conduct research on our own folk art collection, I recall vividly my reaction to seeing this piece for the first time. My first thought was "I can't believe it's that small." The iconic painting is only about 11" x 18". It occupied a small section of wall just to the right as you entered  the folk art museum's "Carolina Room," and I remember thinking how unfortunate it is that we will never know who painted it.

Now that we do know, this painting rises, in my estimation, from a larger-than-life folk art icon to an unequivocal national treasure. But it's going to be hard to adjust my thinking (and my lecture notes) after speaking about this piece to my own grad students for the past 25 years.

Where There's Smoke....Joseph and the Burning of Troy

Eureka moments are rare indeed. For nearly 70 years the Fenimore Art Museum has had a painting of Poestenkill, New York (near Albany) by Joseph Henry Hidley in its collection. Hidley, a house painter, carpenter, taxidermist, and handyman, painted a number of bird’s-eye views of his home town from different angles and at different times of the year. There are several of these works in the collection of the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, Virginia. I have always felt (no surprise here) that ours was the best, owing to the dynamic sweep of the diagonal lines in the landscape that add vitality to the composition.

Primary among those strong diagonals is the mass of dark clouds on the horizon. This is somewhat of a convention in American landscape art, and we see it often in the works of Thomas Cole, who uses the passing storm as a kind of symbol of nature’s cleansing power. In the Hidley painting it seemed a more distant, and perhaps not so symbolic, point of interest.

The truth should not have been a surprise, but it was. Folk artists were much more literal than symbolic in their works, especially in the 19th century. They tended to paint exactly what they saw, because they were often painting for local patrons who knew the subject as well as they did. Rest assured that the buildings depicted in this painting were actually there on May 10, 1862, when Hidley signed and dated this work.

Something else was lurking there too, which he dutifully recorded, perhaps without even knowing what it was. In the early afternoon of May 10, 1862, sparks from a locomotive set a covered railroad bridge on fire in Troy, New York, eight miles west of Poestenkill. Winds spread the fire throughout the city, and by evening it had claimed more than 500 buildings and five lives. No one had ever connected the fire to the Hidley painting until about two years ago, when staff at the Rensselaer County Historical Society brought it to our attention. They correctly noted that from Hidley’s perspective, Troy sits directly under that ominous black cloud.

As he sat on that hillside on a spring afternoon, it is entirely possible that Hidley did not realize that, in the course of documenting the beauty of his town, he was recording the destruction of another.

Top:

Poestenkill, New York, 1862, by Joseph Henry Hidley (1830-1872), oil on wood panel, 19" x 31 1/4"

Above:

Engraving, Ruins of the Great Fire of Troy, New York, May 10, 1862.