Two Great Folk Artists at the Harvest Festival!

I spent the day at The Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown with the family, enjoying the historic buildings, the wagon rides, great food, music, and of course the Empire State Carousel, all at the annual Harvest Festival. What I also found, and had to share in a quick post here, was two terrific folk artists working in time honored traditions and offering their wares for sale.

The first is the decoy carver Jonathan J. Dowdall from Burlington Flats, N.Y. Jonathan was a cabinetmaker who has been carving his own decoys since he was a boy. He uses his own decoys to hunt, so he knows how these functional sculptures are supposed to work. Holding up one of his birds, Jonathan explained how, in the working models, he adds weights to the underside to get them to sit naturally in the water. The carving on his decoys is remarkable; the painting superb.

The other folk artist is Walter Fleming, who has been a tinsmith for more than 25 years. I used to have him come to Cooperstown to teach the craft at our annual Seminars on American Culture back in the 1990s. His booth had a lively array of miniature weathervanes and silhouettes. Walter also took some time to explain the workings of an ingenius French-designed automatic candle snuffer that he has reproduced.

One artist in wood, the other in metal. Both interpreting the long-standing practice of creating of useful sculpture and both grounded in a solid craft tradition. If you enjoy the artistic side of American traces and crafts, these are two contemporary artists you will want to see. The Harvest Festival runs through tomorrow, Sunday, September 13.

"Stimp": The Wall Stenciller of Bump Tavern

They are the most elusive folk artists, even though their output was prolific and widespread. I’m talking about the stencillers who decorated the plaster walls of homes, businesses, and public buildings in the early 19th century. Only a few have been identified, but if you have been to The Farmers’ Museum, you have probably seen the work of one of the most interesting and colorful of these characters.

Bump Tavern is very popular among the thousands of museum visitors that come to the museum each year, but few people realize that the wall decoration relates closely to a body of decorative work in Connecticut, where the Bump family came from. When the tavern was moved to the museum in the 1950s, workers discovered stenciling under wallpaper in three second floor rooms. The plaster was beyond restoration, so the museum decided to preserve one section of the original wall (viewable behind a hinged wallboard, above) and have the rest of the stenciling recreated by a member of the Historical Society of Early American Decoration.

Early scholars of American wall stenciling noticed the similarity of the original Bump Tavern stencil patterns with a number of homes in Litchfield County, Connecticut, including the Isaac Hartwell house in Washington. The stenciller is thought to have also worked in Northfield Farms, Massachusetts, where he decorated the Stratton Tavern (right and below left), and in Dover Plains, New York, where he stencilled the walls of the Perry House (above). Local tradition held that the stenciller of the Hartwell house was a man known only as “Stimp,” who drifted into town as an older traveling artist and decorated Mr. Hartwell’s parlor in the early 1830s. According to one local source’s childhood memory, Stimp went to his client’s home in 1834, “crazed with drink,” and tried to kill Hartwell. He was taken into custody, said to have been led to the village whipping post, and sent to the town jail. There is no other mention of his whereabouts after this incident.

In the late 1990s a local museum researched Stimp, and although the jail records were no help, they did find a Caleb H. Stimpson living in the area in the 1830s. There is no direct evidence to tell us that this was the Stimp in question, but it is interesting that there are also several Stimpsons, from Connecticut, who were among the early settlers of Windham and Ashland, New York, the original site of Bump Tavern. This research is summarized here.

So now when you wander through the second floor of Bump Tavern admiring the artist’s signature pinwheel and acorn borders, distinctive swag and tassel cornice patterns, and S-curved floral motifs, you can appreciate the New England ties of both the owner and the artist. You can also see how a 19th-century folk artist used his repertoire of images to decorate a complex space full of nooks and crannies. You can wonder why he left the job before it was complete (see below). And, lastly, you can imagine how an artist prone to drinking to excess managed to work day after day in a tavern with temptation stalking him in every corner.

Ralph Fasanella's Labor of Love

There’s really only one post I would consider doing on my first Labor Day as a folk art blogger. As anyone who knows me will attest, I have a particular fascination with the life and work of Ralph Fasanella, the subject of my dissertation and an exhibition and book back in 2001. His life story is a fitting backdrop to our annual day of relaxation marking the end of summer.


And what a life story it is. Fasanella was born to Italian immigrants on Labor Day in 1914 (okay, this might be off by a day or too but it is too symbolic to ignore) and spent his youth working with his father delivering ice in Lower Manhattan and the Bronx. It was back breaking work, slinging huge blocks of ice over the shoulder with ice tongs and hauling them up tenement stairs. His mother, the real influence on his life, worked in the garment trades and was an active union member. She was also an early antifascist, hosting meetings in their apartment in the 1920s to protest Mussolini long before anyone had even heard of Hitler.


Ralph became a garment worker and truck driver, among other things, and in the late 1930s fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. These were the 3,000 or so Americans who volunteered to travel to Spain clandestinely to fight against the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco. After returning from Spain he became a Union organizer before finally turning to painting in the late 1940s. Over the course of the next 50 years, until his death in 1997, Fasanella created a body of work that celebrated working people, their neighborhoods and communities, protested the injustices done to them throughout American history, and questioned mainstream American values.



His basic message is that we too often forget; we forget where we come from, who sacrificed for us so that we wouldn’t have to, and who and what it is that truly sustains us. One of his great paintings is the one shown above, in the collection of the Fenimore Art Museum. It depicts a labor parade, but not on Labor Day. The occasion for this parade was a far bigger and more important labor holiday prior to World War II: May Day, the International Workers’ Day celebrated each May 1st for decades throughout America and Europe.

In “May Day” (1947, 50” x 80”) Fasanella pays tribute to the heroes of Labor, in the center, a group that includes Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Sacco and Vanzetti, and yes, Karl Marx. He also shows the power of collectivity in the masses of works marching across the canvas from the left. To the right he shows the world they are struggling to create; a working-class dream of decent, affordable housing, room for recreation and learning, and the time and capacity to see and appreciate beauty.

On this Labor Day, as the country enjoys a day off from work, Fasanella’s paintings are here to remind us that we should always remember that even in these difficult economic times we enjoy far more than previous generations could wish for. I have no doubt that he would remind us that we owe a debt to those who struggled and suffered to make all that we enjoy possible. A debt that can only be paid through remembrance. If you had the good fortune to visit Fasanella’s studio during his lifetime, you may have noticed that off in a corner, but within plain sight of every painting that he created, sat a pair of ice tongs.

The Vegetarian Lumberjack

A disaster in the making, frozen in time. A logging raft with seven men aboard rounds a sharp turn in the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania sometime around the 1840s. As the men tug desperately at the oars, the raft smashes into a large rock in the center of the river and breaks apart. The men jump for their lives and cling to the raft to avoid being swept downriver by the swift current.

This scene (above), painted by Linton Park about 1874, spent many years as wall decoration in a loggers’ hotel in Burnside, Pennsylvania, near the scene of the accident. Its presence there must have been a searing reminder of the hazards of this way of life. The artist knew logging, to be sure, but research into his life has revealed that he was a most unusual character with a wide range of enterprises.

Linton Park was born in 1826, the last of nine children of Scotch-Irish immigrants who settled Indiana County, Pennsylvania. Family tradition holds that from his earliest days, Park was a confirmed vegetarian, once even scolding the family dog for gnawing a bone. He worked as a logger, carpenter and painter in a number of nearby towns, and ended up in Washington, DC in 1863, working on the crew that painted the new dome of the Capitol Building. A photo of him at this time appears at left.

It wasn’t long before Park had his brush with greatness. In 1864 he joined the Union Army, and served in the DC Infantry assigned to the Presidential Guard. According to a story written in 1905 by his nephew, Park complained directly to President Lincoln about being served salt pork. According to this account, Lincoln replied, “You want me to turn you out to graze like Nebuchadezzar?” To which Park replied, “It would beat salt pork.” Lincoln then wrote out on a sheet of paper, “The bearer, Linton Park, is herewith granted permission to browse wherever he chooses.” If only this paper survived, vegetarians everywhere could have used this Presidential Proclamation to have their food preferences accommodated a century before it was fashionable to do so.

Later in life Park became an inventor, and received patents for a Venetian-type window blind, a “Cottage Window Shade,” and, more in keeping with his dietary preferences, a device for peeling vegetables that he called the “Vegetarian.” He also painted, not just scenes but also wagons, furniture, and signs. His most famous painting is a rollicking, Breugelesque scene of a flax scotching bee, in the National Gallery of Art (above). The logging pictures, which include the Fenimore Art Museum scene of the rafting accident, stemmed from his early days when he crewed on log rafts and even helped build them.

In our scene, among the men tugging at rudders or jumping to avoid certain death, there is one figure at the far right in shirtsleeves who clings to the side of the raft for dear life. Family tradition holds that this is Park himself. One hardly wonders why this creative vegetarian gave up rafting logs in favor of painting them.