The Limner Makes a House Call

Portraiture was a tough way to make a living in 19th-century America, but it was also one of the only ways a painter could find work. The Boston portraitist John Singleton Copley once complained: “Were it not for portraiture, painting would be unknown in this place.”

What made portrait painting so difficult? The patrons, who knew little about art, and the people around them, who knew nothing. Few folk artists recorded the trials and tribulations of their own lives, but at least one trained artist left us with his own version of life as a traveling portrait painter in the early decades of the 1800s. This painter was Charles Bird King, and his painting The Itinerant Artist is in our collection at the Fenimore Art Museum.

King was born in 1785 in Newport, Rhode Island, and trained in New York and London prior to achieving notoriety as a painter of stunning portraits of 143 American Indian Chiefs who were visiting Washington, DC in 1821. Our painting, done much later, shows the artist looking back at his early days when he was a young artist struggling to make a living.

The Itinerant Artist is a large painting (44 3/4" x 57") that depicts a portrait painter, possibly King himself, trying to paint the likeness of the lady of the house while getting unwanted criticism from an old woman, probably the sitter's mother. Unlike established artists who worked alone in their studios, the itinerant folk artist often had to contend with chaotic environments (they often set up shop temporarily in a tavern) and extended family.

King shows the subject of the portrait in her finest dress, sitting upright to present herself appropriately for what may have been the only portrait painted of her during her entire life. One of her daughters gives her reassurance, while at her feet sits an African -American child who is most likely a slave or servant of the household.

Another distraction for the poor artist can be seen behind him. A boy of the household is trying his hand at portraiture while looking over the shoulder of the portrait painter. His sister looks on. In all likelihood, the family members would have seen as much merit in the efforts of the boy as they did in the artist.

The man of the house, of course, wants nothing to do with any of this. He casts a disdainful look over his shoulder as he heads out the door with his rifle to do something useful like hunt for food.

Imagine trying to work in this household with all of the distractions seen so far. These pale in comparison to the wailing of this infant in the crib at his mother's feet. Imagine also having artistic aspirations, perhaps to be a great history painter or at least a prosperous journeyman. It’s no wonder that James Whsitler once defined a portrait as “a painting with something a little wrong with the mouth.”

Of course, the subject’s ignorance of art could also be an advantage for the artist. The peddler, tinker and schoolmaster James Guild of Vermont described his first attempt at portrait painting in his journal in 1818: “It makes me smile when I think of while I was daubing on paint on a piece of paper, it would not be called painting, for it looked more like a strangled cat than it did like her. However I told her it looked like her and she believed it.”

Edgar Tolson: Kentucky Gothic

If we did not know who carved the “Temptation of Adam” in the Fenimore Art Museum collection (lower right) it would be easy to infer that it must have been done by a person singularly devoted to God and living a simple, holy life. What we do know about the legendary carver Edgar Tolson, however, radically changes how we must interpret this masterpiece of American folk sculpture.

Tolson was born in 1904 in Wolfe County in eastern Kentucky, the fourth of eleven children of poor tenant farmers. When he was nine, Edgar carved a table; he went on to carve a whole set of dinnerware for his family. The region was known for its roughness, and Tolson told stories of gunfights in nearby Lee City that left dozens dead. His father was also a lay minister who schooled his children with frequent quotations from the Bible.

In spite of his religious upbringing, or perhaps because of it, Edgar became a notorious (and dangerous) prankster. He once loosened a board in his church’s floor so that when his long-winded uncle stood up to testify he smashed straight through the floor. Even more bizarre, when he was eighteen Tolson rigged some dynamite to the side of the church, set off a long fuse, and went in and sat down with the other congregants. The blast blew the side of the church off, blew out all of the windows, and fortunately only killed an old dog. When asked about this incident years later Tolson recalled, “We didn’t like the church and the way they was carrying on. We thought we’d have us some fun and would have died having it.”

Tolson eventually settled down, married, and had a family of his own. He worked in mines, and sawmills and continued to farm. He also began to preach, but became prone to alcoholic binges and relations with other women. He served a year in the state penitentiary for deserting his family and ended up, not surprisingly, divorced.

It was only after suffering a stroke in the late 1950s that Tolson turned his attention to woodcarving. The sculptures he made are now the most recognizable folk art ever to come out of Kentucky. His favorite theme: The Fall of Man, which included Adam and Eve in the Garden (upper left, private collection) Temptation of Adam (above right, Fenimore Art Museum) and Expulsion from Eden (below, Hall Collection, Milwaukee Art Museum). He produced about a hundred of these carvings. The key component of this series is always Temptation, and the autobiographic implications are obvious.

Tolson’s figures are always upright and stoic, resigned to their fate but resolute in their determination to survive. Each figure stands alone, even in his tableau. Perhaps this is the artist’s way of communicating the individual burden of personal responsibility for one’s actions. He once said, “Every man knows when he transgresses God’s law. Both Saint and Sinner.” This was a preacher who had faced many demons, and exorcised them with a penknife and a piece of Kentucky poplar.

New-Found Folk Art of the Young Republic

The discovery and collecting of American folk art in the middle of the 20th century led to some pretty dramatic stories about where these great artworks were found. One of the most dramatic of these stories involves some 150 paintings in the Fenimore Art Museum collection, some of which are now widely acknowledged masterpieces.

Marion Raymond was born in Massachusetts in 1881, the daughter of a patent lawyer who settled the family in Newtonville, outside of Boston. Her mother died when she was 19, and Marion and her widowed father spent a great deal of time thereafter traveling the world.

William J. Gunn was born in Portland, Maine in 1879, graduated from Harvard, and became an advertising manager at the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company in Chicago. In 1906 he learned that he had Bright’s disease, then erroneously thought to be fatal. He later wrote, “Now that I had been saddled with an incurable disease, I decided it would be nice to see a little more of the world.”

These two inveterate wanderers met overseas and were married in Yokohama, Japan in 1914. They settled in Newtonville. During their married life of 38 years, the Gunns traveled widely and collected extensively. All told they made three trips around the world before William died in 1952. A visitor to their house in the 1950s described it as a museum filled with possessions collected from all over the world. After Marion’s death in 1957 the collections were donated to non-profit organizations. One group of paintings was given by Marion to her long-time servant, Grace Marr, who offered them for sale to a private dealer.

I simply cannot imagine the dealer’s face when he saw where the collection had been stored. For reasons that are difficult to ascertain, William and Marion had collected some 600 folk art paintings and kept them in a barn on their Newtonville property. Many of the works had been removed from their frames; others were covered with dirt, bat and bird droppings, and barn paint.

The dealer quickly contacted another dealer, Mary Allis of Connecticut, who had the capital to buy the entire collection. She in turn offered the collection to Stephen Clark, who selected 150 of the best works to come to Cooperstown. By the time Louis and Agnes Halsey Jones catalogued and published this collection in 1960, the folk art world knew that its contours were forever changed by the surprise addition of this unknown collection of masterpieces.

Why did the Gunns collect these works so passionately? We can’t be sure, although some of the works reflect their travels abroad, like the great watercolor of Venice. But it is worth noting that many of the paintings, like the portraits seen here, depict children with pets. Although childless, the Gunns left alot of money to childrens' service agencies. They also were major benefactors of the SPCA. At the time of her death, Marion had no fewer than 20 cats. She did at one time have many dogs, but as she got older she rationalized, “I, of course, will soon go. Dogs would grieve for me, but cats will not cry, will live up their time.” Perhaps the collection was less the product of connoisseurship than it was of simple empathy.

Top: Boy in Gray with Dog, artist unidentified, ca. 1820. This impish youngster was immediately nicknamed "Butch" up on his arrival at the Fenimore Art Museum in 1959.

Upper left: Venice, artist unidentified, ca. 1850. Probably a schoolgirl watercolor done from a print. Notice the New England costumes of the "Venetians."

Upper right: Agnes Halsey Jones (second from right) at the openinig of "New-Found Folk Art of the Young Republic," featuring the Gunn Collection at Fenimore Art Museum in 1960. Notice the John Brewster Jr. portrait of Francis O. Watts with Bird just behind her.

Lower left: Little Child with Big Dog, by William Matthew Prior, 1848.

The Chronicler of York, Lewis Miller

I have wanted to do a post on Lewis Miller since I started this blog, even though we don't have any of his work in the Fenimore Art Museum. His story, and the body of work he created, is rich and compelling in its attachment to a locale and the daily habits of its inhabitants. Between 1810 and 1865, Miller created some 2,000 drawings that give us a picture of the life of York, Pennsylvania that is unparalleled in any other American city. He called the volume, humbly, “The Chronicle of York.”

Miller was born in York in 1796 the 10th and youngest child of German immigrant parents who brought him up with a literary and classical education few folk artists ever receive. He even went so far as to take a Grand Tour of Europe in 1840, an undertaking usually reserved for the wealthy or those artists underwritten by a patron. It’s worth noting that he traveling through Europe chiefly on foot. Throughout his life Miller was a master carpenter, an avid traveler, and a writer of poetry and prose.

His greatest asset was his ability to record the mundane and the miraculous, often with a gentle, earthy humor. At the beginning of “The Chronicle of York” he states: “All of the Pictures Containing in this Book…are true Sketches, I myself being there upon the places and Spot and put down what happened. And was close by of the Greatest number. Saw the whole scene enacted before my eyes.” Here are some examples.

A self-portrait (top), not as an artist but as a carpenter, shown at his workbench with all of his trusty tools of the trade, along with detailed information on the location and nature of his shop.

A depiction of Tom Thumb’s visit to York, showing him on a miniature stage and surrounded by local dignitaries.

Two boys being thrown over a fence for stealing apples.
A robbery in a butcher’s shop.
And my favorite, “The Retreat of the Bad Woman’s,” showing a group of concerned citizens tearing down a local house of ill-repute while the “bad women” jump a fence to get away in the background.
These drawings, along with nearly 2,000 others, are in the collection of the Historical Society Museum of the York County Heritage Trust. A selection is always on view.

In May 1882, the 85-year-old Lewis Miller was impoverished and in poor health. He wrote to an old friend for financial help, and was so grateful for the 50 dollars he received that he produced another 200 portraits of people from their old hometown. Although his body and his bank account were failing, Miller’s memory and his passion for the world around him remained undaunted until the end. He died in September of the same year.