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.

Earl Cunningham: Safe Harbors and Lost Horizons

The truck’s name was Dirigo, Latin for "I direct," and it fit the temperament of its owner. Earl Cunningham had a strong independent streak, beginning in his youth when, at the age of 13, he left home to make a living as a tinker and a peddler. Growing up in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, in the 1890s and early 1900s, Cunningham also had a lifelong fascination with maritime life. The way he lived his life, and the manner in which he chose to express his dreams and record his experiences, led to the creation of one of the most visually arresting bodies of work in 20th-century folk art.

While spending his youth trying to sell paintings of boats and New England farms painted on salvaged wood, Cunningham also learned the maritime trade from a local ship's captain and obtained a license to pilot boats in harbors and on rivers. In 1915 he bought a 35-foot cabin cruiser, where he lived with his new wife Iva, sailing between Maine and Florida.

The Sunshine State captivated him, with its lush, tropical flora and fauna, American Indian communities, and natural wonders like the Everglades. Cunningham collected Indian artifacts and opalized coral, hoping to sell them back in Maine, and painted his surroundings in brilliant colors. He eventually settled in St. Augustine in the late 1940s, where he opened an antique shop called the Overfork Gallery (a play on the phrase “fork over”). In adjoining rooms he had a gallery of paintings that represented his life's work. They were not for sale.

Cunningham had two life goals; first, he wanted to create 1000 paintings and house them in a museum, preferably a museum of his own making. After several failed attempts to accomplish this goal, Cunningham settled in St. Augustine and set up his shop and gallery. In January 1961, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy accepted his gift of The Everglades on behalf of her sailing-obsessed husband and hung it in his office. In his lifetime the artist completed about 450 works, but despite the success with the Kennedy White House they did not make it into museum collections while he was still alive. There is now, thanks to the collecting of Michael and Marilyn Mennello, a large group of his paintings in the Mennello Museum of American Art in Orlando, Florida. Cunningham’s other life goal, to buy a houseboat and once again live on the waterways he loved, was likewise never realized.

The paintings themselves are remarkable. A great selection of them traveled to the Fenimore Art Museum in 2008 as part of the exhbition Earl Cunningham's America. Brilliantly colored, and focused upon wildlife and all manner of sailing vessels in snug harbors and bays, they seem to reflect Cunningham’s love of nature and his search for a home on the water. It is also fascinating how he combined the Florida landscape with legends of Norse sailors recalled from his youth in Maine.

Cunningham had a long-time companion in Theresia Paffe, who owned the building that housed his gallery. Their relationship was at times tumultuous, as Cunningham was increasingly riddled with anxiety and depression toward the end of his life, but they maintained a close relationship until his death. In 1977, at the age of 84, Cunningham shot himself. Knowing his lifelong ambition to own a houseboat, Theresia noted poignantly in 1979: “He died with the price of one in the bank, and every picture in Overfork has water in it.”

Top to bottom:

The Twenty-One, 1977, oil on fiberboard, 28 11/16" x 52 3/4"
Collection of Marilyn L. and Michael A. Mennello

Earl Cunningham standing in front of Overfork Gallery, 1970

Photograph by Jerry Uelsmann

Palm Beach, 1950, oil on fiberboard, 32 9/16" x 61 1/4"
Collection of Marilyn L. and Michael A. Mennello

The Everglades, about 1960, oil on masonite, 32 1/2" x 60 13/16"
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Did F.H. Sweet Really Paint with his Feet?

Here’s a good Curatorial Tall Tale from the research files. We have had this painting of the Buck Farm by F.H. Sweet in our collection since 1961. I’ve never exhibited it, but recalled reading somewhere that there was something unusual about the artist. Just today I went back to the file and found a note from 1964, which read:

This week a lady visitor told the guide that she was adopted into the Buck family at the age of five years and lived in this house until her marriage. She remembers Mr. Sweet, the artist, who came along the road one day and asked to paint the house. He was born without arms and painted this and another just like it, with his feet.

True story. Not.

Some years later one of the students in the Cooperstown Graduate Program conducted interviews with Buck family members and even found Sweet’s niece living just a short distance away in Mohawk, New York, near Utica. Here’s what the student found out:

Frank H. Sweet was born in Middleville, about 10 miles north of Mohawk, date unknown but most definitely with both arms intact. As a youth his right side was paralyzed by an overdose of medicine. He worked in Glens Falls as a bookkeeper for a time, and then moved back to the Mohawk Valley. At some point he started painting for a living, getting buggy rides from the family he lived with and apparently painting or sketching local farms from the buggy, using his left hand. He died before 1940 and is buried in Middleville Cemetery in Herkimer County.

This painting of the Buck Farm (seen in its entirety at the top) was painted in Salisbury Center, just a few miles north of Mohawk, about 1915. Mr. Buck was a builder of stone fences and used oxen to haul the stone. The object on the red barn (seen in the detail above) is a pair of ox horns. Buck also ran a slaughterhouse, processing the meat in the red barn and storing in the barn on the left side of the painting.

And so Frank H. Sweet joins a long list of folk artists with disabilities that have been documented traveling the back roads of 19th-century America plying their trade, including such legendary figures as John Brewster, Jr. and Joseph Whiting Stock. It says a lot about early 20th-century sensibilities that he was remembered as a kind of sideshow figure, supposedly painting with is feet. Good solid research has put his brush back in his hand, where it belongs. And it won’t be long before this painting goes up on the walls of our folk art gallery here at the Fenimore Art Museum.

The African American Cigar Store Indian

This is another in a series of posts about the great folk art pieces included in the Fenimore Art Museum’s traveling exhibition Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art, which is on view at the New York State Museum in Albany through January 6, 2010. This exhibition is curated by Dr. Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, Director of the Cooperstown Graduate Program, who, by the way, has just been awarded the prestigious Katherine Coffey Award from the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. Unlike the first sculpture I discussed in my August 31 post, which was a depiction of a black man by a white artist, this piece was created by an African American carver.

Our “African American Cigar Store Figure” (above left) was found in Freehold, New Jersey in the mid-20th century. According to local tradition, it was carved in about 1825 by a freed slave named Job. This has never been substantiated, but the piece itself presents some compelling physical evidence that strongly suggests that it is the product of a black folk artist.

First, it is not made like any other known cigar store figures carved by white artists (many of them German immigrants) in American urban centers in the mid-19th century. These figures were usually made by sectioning off a length of solid log (usually pine, which was straight-grained: old ships’ masts were ideal for this purpose) and carving the figure’s body and head. The arms, which often extended outward, would be carved separately and joined to the body. Job’s figure is not made this way at all. Instead, the artist carved and joined thirteen separate pieces of wood to form the body and its appendages. The precision of the joinery suggests that Job may have mastered the craft of cabinetmaking, a trade he would have shared with numerous African Americans of his time.



Second, this figure does not look like any other known cigar store figure. The torso and arms are boldly stylized into angular, geometric shapes. Likewise, the face is flattened and mask-like. The vast majority of cigar store figures were naturalistic carvings with faces that were either brutally savage or idealized with Anglo-American features. Since our figure’s discovery and publication in the 1940s, numerous scholars have noted these distinctly African stylistic traits, as seen in the examples of African art at above left and right.


The folk art scholar and collector Michael D. Hall (whose collection is in the Milwaukee Art Museum) often used our Job figure to illustrate how the best American folk art was represented by those rare pieces that were within an established visual tradition yet displayed an individual’s stamp of creativity and innovation. I can’t help but agree. But there is also something about this figure that is quintessentially American in the delicate balance between this former slave’s cultural memory and his social, economic, and artistic aspirations.