Snap the Whip, 1872, Winslow Homer, American (1836-1910), oil, Reproduction print.

Winslow Homer was born in Boston and lived in Cambridge. He began his career as an illustrator and was a correspondent in 1861 (Civil War) for Harper’s Weekly, then a very popular magazine. After 1876 he devoted himself to painting only, in Maine in the summer and Florida or the Bahamas in winter. After 1884 he lived alone in Maine, almost a recluse and never married. His early paintings are authentic and attractive visual records of American country life of the 1860’s and 70’s. Known for his directness, realism, objectivity and splendid color.  Later the sea became his chief theme, no people, and he did powerful expressions of the majesty and beauty of the sea.  He excelled as a water-colorist, in severe simplification, concentration on large masses and movements, strong linear rhythms.  He was the most many-sided and colorful American artist of the later l9~ century.  Snap the whip is a rough, high spirited game in which children join hands in a line and run in a circle anchored by the biggest member, who sometimes grasps a tree or a comrade for support, until their gathering speed snaps the ones on the far end away from the spiral and caps flying, they tumble to the ground.

Norman Rockwell Illustrations, American (1894-1978) Portfolio of reproductions of paintings.

Norman Rockwell is probably one of the most popular 20th century American artists because his subject matter is always about life in America.  With great detail in every painting carefully done.  Rockwell was born in New York City in 1894 and became a professional artist at age 16.  He designed the cover of the Saturday Evening Post for the first time when he was 22 and eventually completed over 300 additional covers for that magazine. Norman Rockwell and his covers were a huge part of the success of the Saturday Evening Post.  His subjects accurately portrayed the life of the average citizen as he or she grows up, falls in love, marries, raises a family, and enjoys the fruit of hard work, courage, honesty, and the American way of life. 

The titles included in this portfolio are:

1. The Homecoming

2. The Char Woman

3. The Gossips

4. The Bottom of the Ninth

5. The Plumbers

6. Saying Grace

7. Lion Keeper

8. Stealing Home

9. Girl in the Mirror

Louisiana Rice Fields, 1928, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975)

Benton was born in Missouri, and since both his temperament and family traditions were conducive to a strong affection for the customs and landscape of the Middle West, he became one of the principal proponents of regionalism. Louisiana Rice Fields presents his essentially picturesque view of rural life through its strong relationships of line and its tonal and color contrasts. His caricatured personalities and colorful versions of local customs were in accord with popular conceptions of the American way of life. The regionalism of the late twenties and thirties was not only a rediscovery of America, it was also and attempt by artists to achieve a reintegration with the traditional pattern of American life and a reaffirmation of faith in that life.

Stone City, 1930, Grant Wood (1891-1942). Oil. Reproduction print.

Stone City, 26 miles northeast of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, once a limestone quarry, became a ghost town consisting of a general store and a bridge because of competition with Portland cement.  It was founded by J. A. Green, Irish pioneer, who brought steam drills and one thousand workers there to quarry limestone.  About 1883 he built a twenty room stone  mansion, a stone opera house and a stone church.  One corner of the mansion with a Gothic window added shows at the left of the painting.  Rearrangement to fit the abstract design, said to be the starting point of all Wood's pictures, omitted the church but included farm buildings, horses, cows, windmills, and billboard.  The bulbous trees suggest the lacquered sponges he used as trees in a model for a realtor, hut he said he got the idea for them from his mother’s Haviland china.  The stylized landscapes which followed Stone City affected advertising and landscaping and came to be associated with the name Grant Wood.

American Gothic 1930, Grant Wood (1891-1942). Reproduction print.

Wood got the idea for American Gothic in August of 1930, when he visited Eldon, a tiny town in southern Iowa. He came upon the house destined to make him famous.  The modest five-room structure, built in the 1880’s by local craftsmen, in a style known as Carpenter Gothic, appealed to Wood because of its compactness and emphatic design.  With his fondness for repeating geometries, he immediately envisioned a long and lean couple, “American Gothic people,” he called them, to go along with the house and to echo its predominantly vertical lines. Wood turned to family photographs to give his painting an old-fashioned, Victorian cast.  He transformed his sister, Nan, into a plausible stand-in for one of his relatives.  For Dr. McKeeby, the Cedar Rapids dentist who agreed to pose as the man, Wood found a collarless shirt among his painting rags to go with the bibbed overalls and a dark jacket.  Wood worked on American Gothic for about two months, finishing it in time to send it, along with Stone City, to the jury for the 1930 annual exhibition of American paintings and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago.  No one could have been more surprised than Wood when the painting was not only admitted but won a bronze medal and became an overnight public success.

Gray and Gold, 1942, John Rogers Cox, American (1915-1990) Oil on canvas 35 3/4 x 49 1/2 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH Reproduction print.

John R Cox was a bank clerk and then director of the Terre Haute, Indiana Art Gallery before beginning to paint in 1941.  His feeling for color and design, as seen in his lyrical landscapes, has brought him recognition as a leading contemporary American artist. He has exhibited his work in Chicago, Cleveland and Toledo.  The Metropolitan Museum of Art gave him a distinguished award for his painting Gray and Gold.  

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The painting’s subject suggests a political theme.  The crossroad is a focal point, as are the dark storm clouds.  The lack of wires on the telephone wires may be a sign of the times or may signify a lack of connection.  Cox painted Gray and Gold shortly after the U.S. joined World War II, and its image of amber waves of grain threatened by ominous storm clouds is symbolic.  The paintings foreground features an intersection of two dirt lanes, as well as a telephone pole emblazoned with political campaign posters.  The artist seems to imply that American democracy is at a crossroads during this time of combat against spread of fascism in Europe and Asia.  Interestingly the work was inspired by the landscape around Cox’s hometown of Terre Haute, Indiana, a location nicknamed “The Crossroads of America” due to the junction of major North-South and East-West national highways within city limits. 

The Domino Players, 1943, Horace Pippin, American (1888-1946) Phillips Collection, Washington, DC. Reproduction print.

The legend and saga of Horace Pippin will never be forgotten.  Like Booker T. Washington, he rose to prominence from obscurity.  Born in Westchester PA, he began as a hotel porter, iron moulder, warehouseman and junk dealer.  At the outbreak of World War I he enlisted in the Army and was wounded in action in 1917 while fighting in France.  Not fit for work as a result of his severe wound, he returned to Westchester and began painting.  In 1937 the art critic, Christian Brinton, discovered his talent and fame soon followed.  Pippin was self-taught.  His strongest work was "John Brown Going to His Hanging" (1942).  Pippin's landscapes such as "Buffalo Hunt", revealed a stark loneliness and vastness of scale as well as a deep concern for detail.  He continually isolated objects against light backgrounds and reduced their crisp silhouetted forms to two-dimensional patterns and arrangements that recall Matisse and the French Art-Nouveau artists.  Like those in a Persian rug, Pippin's colours were bright, jewel-like and fresh as though unmixed and applied directly from the tube.  His bizarre and simple primitivism was a n integral part of our nation's vigor and creative luster.

The Dividing of the Ways, 1947, "Grandma” Anna Mary Robertson Moses, American (1860-1961) Oil on masonite. Reproduction print.

Anna Mary Robertson Moses was a folk artist who began painting at age 78.  She was from Virginia but moved to New York state.  An art critic discovered her work hanging in a local drug store and next year put it on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibit of unknown American artists. 

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At the age of 100, Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses) was still painting her recollections of life in a vanished rural America.  They are scenes of great charm in their reflection of a happy innocence that is generally viewed nostalgically as a native virtue of the recent national past.  Her paintings, for all their ‘primitive” quality, are acutely realistic in intention.  She records the details of every visual component of her happy world with an utterly charming faith in the obvious, and absolutely invulnerable innocence.  She said that she painted the way life used to be.

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This painting hangs at the American Folk Art Museum.

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Sources of Country Music, 1975, Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), mural

This mural was painted by Thomas Hart Benton.  It was commissioned by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, to tell the story of the history of country music.  Five scenes in the painting show different kinds of American folk music that led to country music.  Square dancers move in time to fiddlers, women sing in a church choir, barefoot mountain women sing to a dulcimer, a cowboy sings with one foot on his saddle, and an African American cotton picker strums on a banjo, while across the river African American women dance.  Country singer Tex Ritter was the model for the cowboy and the train is modeled after the Cannonball Special.

            Benton was born in Neosho, Missouri, in 1889 into a political family.  His father was a congressman and his father’s uncle, for whom he was named, was one of the first two senators from Missouri.  Benton spent much of his childhood in Washington, D.C., where he was being groomed for politics.  Instead, he decided to study art.

            American folk music, which Benton celebrates in his picture, was quickly disappearing in the 1970s, even in the country, where it began.  Country music was turning into a big business, which was very different from its local and regional beginnings.  The steam engine in the picture shows that change has come and an older style of country life in America was coming to an end.  Traces of these local traditions, though, lived on in the new style of country music.