Folk Art Such as Hickss the Peaceable Kingdom Tends to Exhibit All of the Following Elements Except

The exhibition American Folk Fine art: The Art of the Common Homo in America, 1750–1900 was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York Metropolis from Nov 30, 1932, through January fourteen, 1933. Presenting American folk fine art as part of a continuous artistic tradition reaching back to the eighteenth century, it was the most comprehensive, illuminating display of the bailiwick held up to that time.

Fig. two. Manchester Valley by Joseph Pickett (1848–1918), New Promise, Pennsylvania, 1914-1918? Oil with sand on canvas, 45 1/two by sixty five/8 inches. In lectures he gave throughout the 1930s, Holger Cahill oft compared the piece of work of Pickett, a carpenter with no training in the painting trades, with that of Edward Hicks, trained equally a passenger vehicle and sign painter. He considered the work of both men extraordinary, but considering Pickett had to invent not just his whole approach to planning and creating a moving picture, but also the materials with which to practice information technology (he was said to have fabricated his ain brushes and paint), Cahill perceived his work equally "the expression of sheer genius." A number of French artists, Cahill reported, especially Fernand Léger, considered Manchester Valley the greatest American landscape. Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

Fig. 3. Loon decoy, American, nineteenth century. Wood and pigment; top xi i/ii, width 17 i/4, depth half-dozen one/8 inches. "Decoys," wrote Cahill, "were made for purely commonsensical purposes, and are particularly interesting as the sculptural expression of the common human. . . . The all-time of the paw-whittled decoys are non so much representations as abstract symbols." Colonial Williamsburg Collections, souvenir of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

Fig. vii. Washington and Lafayette at the Battle of Yorktown past Reuben Law Reed (1841–1921), Acton, Massachusetts, 1860–1880. Oil and golden pigment on canvas, 22 1/iv by 33 7/8 inches. Although he called this painting "quite primitive," it was 1 of Cahill's favorites. He pointed out that "the cannon assurance are very politely refusing to explode around the ii generals, although they cut off the limbs of the people all around." Colonial Williamsburg Collections, souvenir of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

Though lent anonymously, all but two of the works on view were from the drove of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, married woman of John D. Rockefeller Jr., heir to the Standard Oil fortune.¹ Mrs. Rockefeller had caused most of her folk art within the brusque span of the year before the exhibition. She became a folk art collector in a roundabout mode: much to her husband's dismay, she had for some years been a buyer of modern American fine art (she was a founder of the Museum of Modern Art) and in 1928 became a client of the Downtown Gallery on Due west Thirteenth Street, run by Edith Gregor Halpert (1900–1970). Halpert's close friend and adviser Holger Cahill (1887–1960), an original, insightful thinker and author in the New York art world of the 1920s and 1930s, convinced both women that folk art was an integral part of the American artistic tradition and that folk paintings and sculpture were the "ancestors" of modern pieces. Halpert began to offer folk besides as modern art-she and her partner Berthe Kroll Goldsmith, in partnership with Cahill, formed the American Folk Art Gallery, which in 1931 took up a minor space above the Downtown Gallery. Abby Rockefeller then began to collect folk paintings and sculpture in earnest.²

Fig. 1. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874–1948), Oct 1893. Courtesy Rockefeller Archive Centre, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Fig. 5. A view of American Folk Art: The Art of the Mutual Man in America exhibition while at the Rhode Island Schoolhouse of Design (RISD), Providence, Rhode Island, 1933. Rhode Isle School of Design (RISD), Providence.

Throughout the 1920s Cahill had worked in various capacities at the Newark Museum for the remarkably progressive library and museum director John Cotton Dana (1856–1929), who was a pioneer in finding art in everyday objects. After Dana's decease in 1929, Cahill was asked to organize an exhibition for the Newark Museum; he produced American Primitives: An Exhibit of the Paintings of Nineteenth Century Folk Artists, on view from Nov 4, 1930, to February 1, 1931. In traveling throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic states to search out works for this and the succeeding show, American Folk Sculpture: The Piece of work of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Craftsmen, held at Newark from October 20, 1931, through Jan 31, 1932, Cahill acquired valuable knowledge of collectors, dealers, and other sources of folk art in those regions. This knowledge was vital in the subsequent success of the American Folk Fine art Gallery, which could offering top-notch pieces for sale cheers to Cahill's connections.^three Edith Halpert gave Mrs. Rockefeller beginning pick of the best things that came in, and the Rockefeller collection benefited accordingly. Abby Rockefeller didn't rely on Halpert and Cahill to make her decisions about what to buy, yet. Both her art secretary, Elinor Robinson, and Cahill said that Abby made the decisions herself. Some years afterward Cahill wrote Alice Winchester, editor of The Mag ANTIQUES, well-nigh "the boggling quality of the works of art [Abby Rockefeller] collected. This was due, in function, to the fact that she had proficient advice, just it was due mainly to her sense of taste, her enthusiasm and real love for the cloth. I don't believe Mrs. Rockefeller collected simply to brand collections. Whatever she did in the field of art was based on love, and on noesis which she pursued with unending patience."⁴

Fig. eight. Equus caballus weather vane, probably Rochester Iron Works, Rochester, New Hampshire, 1875 –1900. Cast fe with remnants of canvas iron; height 17 7/8, width xx i/8, depth 12 inches. Comparing this nineteenth-century conditions vane with gimmicky sculpture, Cahill remarked: "Different many modernistic stylized animals, with strained tightness in their afflicted poses, this equus caballus gains rather than loses in nobility past the formality of his pose." Cahill considered it "the gem of the drove." Colonial Williamsburg Collections from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Drove, souvenir of David Rockefeller.

Fig. 9. Horse, Pennsylvania, c. 1850. Watercolor and ink on wove paper, 22 seven/8 by 17 5/8 inches. Cahill recollected that he acquired this cartoon in April 1931 from dealer Lillian Boschen in Freehold, New Bailiwick of jersey. "She showed me this beautiful equus caballus, in a lovely walnut frame," he said. "I took one look at information technology. A magnificent sort of penmanship cartoon, a drawing-primary'southward study, Pennsylvania Dutch." He bought information technology for for the American Folk Art Gallery, from which Edith Halpert sold it to Abby Rockefeller. Colonial Williamsburg Collections from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Collection, gift of David Rockefeller.

Past the time Cahill was appointed acting director of the Museum of Modernistic Art and proposed The Fine art of the Common Man every bit a companion to an already scheduled exhibition of academic American art of the period 1862 to 1932, Mrs. Rockefeller had amassed an outstanding folk art drove. Opinions were divided on whether she should be named equally the owner of the drove or whether information technology should be shown anonymously. Abby wrote her son Nelson that "Mrs. Halpert is opposed to [using my name] because she hopes to go on selling me things. She thinks that the minute it is known I take a drove the price of Early American things volition go up. I don't see how it could go up any higher than she puts [it already]." Nelson replied that he feared "Mrs. Halpert has let her business organization instinct slightly touch her judgment," adding that he thought it "would be extremely nice for yous to permit the Museum to use your proper noun." A. Conger Goodyear, president of the museum, thought and so, too, just in the end the collection was shown anonymously.⁵ The exhibition opened with a blackness-tie reception on November 29, 1932. With its impressive display of paintings, sculpture, and related objects, The Fine art of the Common Man was the outset prove to innovate this hitherto forgotten and neglected, but vital, component of the American artistic tradition to the greater American public. Goodyear wrote Mrs. Rockefeller that "the exhibition of American Folk Art has attracted a neat deal of favorable comment, and the itemize prepared past Mr. Cahill has had an peculiarly enthusiastic reception."^half-dozen

Fig. 12. Bust of an officer, American, probably Pennsylvania, 1830–1880. Chalkware and paint; height 13 iii/4, width viii 7/8, depth 5 1/2 inches. Less well-known than the Staffordshire ceramic figures they often imitated were plaster, or chalkware, figures made, according to Cahill, "by and large by the Pennsylvania Germans. . . . They are often better in design and color and are amid the almost interesting examples of American polychromed small sculpture." Colonial Williamsburg Collections, gift of the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund, Inc., through the generosity and involvement of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd and members of the family.

Fig. 13. Eagle past John Haley Bellamy (1836–1914), possibly Portsmouth, New Hampshire, nineteenth century. Wood and paint; height 6 ane/two, width 25 one/2, depth iv inches. "When 1 talks of the crafts as fine art in that location comes to listen . . . John Bellamy . . . [whose work], which is definitely a part of the American craft tradition, is likewise a part of the history of American art, of American creative expression," Cahill declared. "I would non hesitate to identify John Bellamy in the topmost rank of American decorative sculpture in the 19th century." The eagle was illustrated on the comprehend of the Mutual Man catalogue. Colonial Williamsburg Collections, gift of the John D. Rockefeller third Fund, Inc., through the generosity and interest of Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd and members of the family unit.

The exhibition opened with a black-tie reception on Nov 29, 1932. With its impressive display of paintings, sculpture, and related objects, The Art of the Common Man was the beginning show to introduce this hitherto forgotten and neglected, but vital, component of the American artistic tradition to the greater American public. Goodyear wrote Mrs. Rockefeller that "the exhibition of American Folk Art has attracted a great deal of favorable comment, and the catalog prepared by Mr. Cahill has had an specially enthusiastic reception."half dozen

The fine art critics of the New York Times, New York Lord's day, and New York Evening Post were complimentary and, confirming Goodyear'southward written report to Abby Rockefeller, peculiarly admired Cahill's catalogue introduction. Edward Alden Jewell wrote in the Times: "Mr. Cahill's essay in the catalogue should be read by all who visit the exhibition. Information technology furnishes a vivid groundwork and, together with biographical notes, makes much clearer to us today the spirit that urged these largely bearding artists to creation and the struggles they faced in their zealous though for the almost part untutored efforts."⁷

After closing in New York in mid-Jan 1933, the prove traveled to six other venues, much increasing its influence.⁸ When it opened in Philadelphia in Feb 1933, however, Dorothy Grafly set forth an alternate opinion in the Philadelphia Public Ledger: "While archaic art…may be fascinating, while it may take genuine historical value, it belongs to the historical museum rather than to the art gallery….Put along as art per se…information technology develops in the public listen an erroneous impression, and tends non to drag merely to defame all art endeavour in the minds of those who think no farther than to express mirth at what has go then utterly unfamiliar."^ix

Fig. 4. Baby in Cerise Chair, maybe Pennsylvania, 1810–1830. Oil on canvas, 22 by fifteen inches. Cahill didn't write much about this engaging portrait, but he idea so highly of it that it was first in the Common Man catalogue and he included information technology among the paintings in the "pop fine art" section of the Museum of Mod Art's exhibition Art in Our Time, held during the 1939 World's Off-white. Colonial Williamsburg Collections, from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Collection, souvenir of David Rockefeller.

Fig. half dozen. The Preacher, Indiana, c. 1870. Butternut and white pine, acme 21 inches. Most American folk sculpture was made to serve a useful purpose, according to Cahill. But occasionally, he said, "i finds things… which were made simply for the pleasure of the making….In its simplicity of convention, and its combination of rough ability, intimacy, and intensity, [The Preacher] is one of the most striking examples of American folk sculpture." Colonial Williamsburg Collections from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Drove, gift of David Rockefeller.

Yet open-minded exhibition goers plant much to capeesh in the works on view, and occasionally encountered pieces they deemed remarkable. Amidst these were Edward Hicks'south Peaceable Kingdom (Fig. xi) and Joseph Pickett'southward Manchester Valley (Fig. 2). Cahill had found paintings by both Hicks and Pickett during his folk fine art-hunting trips through Pennsylvania, and he considered these artists his personal discoveries. Hicks was known locally in Bucks County, just he was otherwise little known until Cahill introduced his work to a wider audience, starting time with Halpert through the American Folk Art Gallery, and and so through the inclusion of his paintings in the Common Man show. Today examples of his work bring millions of dollars at auction. But it wasn't budgetary value Cahill saw in Hicks's paintings, information technology was "compositional qualities of a high order…innocence of vision and simplicity and freshness of expression…and noesis, likewise. The cognition was limited to what Hicks had learned in the wagon shop, but information technology was clear and well-tried knowledge, solidly founded in tradition and not in theory."¹⁰ Cahill's major signal about folk art—i missed or ignored past the majority of the genre'southward earliest collectors—was that folk paintings, sculpture, and other objects were the work virtually often of craftsmen trained in medieval shop traditions, and later too of amateurs.

Hicks was an outstanding instance of the shop-trained artist-craftsman, having served a 7-year apprenticeship to larn the trade of jitney and ornamental painting. Of such preparation Cahill wrote: "It was a tradition of craftsmanship which grew out of the handling of tools and materials, rather than an academic tradition passed on by schools….The vocation of the painter also had a good deal to practice with his style. House-painters and signpainters stuck to the apartment colors and precision ofoutline which they had learned in their trades. Railroad vehicle painters went in for conventionalized ornament. The specialist in the 'limning of effigies' and the amateur with a little schooling went in for more modeling, and attempted realistic effects."¹¹

Fig. 10. The Tilted Bowl past Matilda A. Haviland (1817–1853), probably Dutchess County, New York, c. 1840. Signed "Matilda A. Haviland" at lower correct. Paint on cotton velvet, 14 1/2 by 17 1/ii inches. "Some of the most beautiful pieces of apprentice folk art were made past women," said Cahill, "withal lifes, bloom pieces, mourning pictures painted on velvet, delicate watercolors of birds, foliage, fruit." He noted: "Here y'all will find perspective used in the most freely arbitrary mode, the contrary perspective which yous often see in modern fine art and which you may find in Japanese painting….Women['s]… knowledge of textiles and dyes explains the quality of the velvet paintings which they made and which are a singled-out contribution to the tradition of still-life painting in this country." Colonial Williamsburg Collections, gift of the Museum of Modern Art, formerly in the collection of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.

Joseph Pickett, whose Manchester Valley Jewett of the New York Times called boggling, was a carpenter. Cahill wrote that it "appears that he was entirely self-taught, and that his work is the expression of sheer genius…. He brought the skills of adept joinery and sound construction to his work, Cahill said, and although he "drew like a child" and "knew nada of perspective," his intuitive understanding of the uses of space, design, and color, and his sense of movement "place such a work as Manchester Valley among the masterpieces of American folk art."¹²

The paintings department was the largest in the Common Man exhibition, and it included, also portraits and landscapes, mourning pictures, sailing pictures, inn signs, and decorative paintings in oil, watercolor, and pastel as well as paintings on velvet, linen, glass, and other materials. Drawings, as well, were included. In the sculpture segmentation were carvings of all kinds, "whittled for the fun of it by farmers, carpenters, and sailors," likewise as pieces made by trained woods- and metalworkers. Amidst sculptures of both types were toys, ships' figureheads, cigar-store Indians, weather condition vanes, molds, decoys, and a variety of other objects, including headstones from graves. Information technology was in the field of American sculpture that Cahill felt that what he called "conventional" art had suffered particularly. "From the middle of the seventeenth century up to the Civil War," he wrote, "there were in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and other parts of the state, many carvers who were closer to the dandy tradition of their art than were the professional sculptors." Artisans and craftsmen, he stressed, "maintained the standards of craft and shop do, helped continue live the fundamentals of tradition in times when there were no masters, and their piece of work has furnished the background for the development of masters. That their work was not the groundwork for the development of American art equally we know information technology today is ane of the accidents of our fine art history."¹³ Cahill saw, as no one else did, that artworks in the craft tradition—too as contributions by both trained and untrained amateurs—were vital parts of the American fine art-history story and needed to exist recognized. American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America 1750-1900 was a brilliant starting time. Information technology introduced Americans to the folk, or in Cahill's words, "the unconventional side of the American tradition in the fine arts." It showed them in more 175 advisedly chosen paintings, sculptures, and related objects, and described to them in a perceptive and readable illustrated catalogue that they could accept home, refer to, and report for years, what had been missing from the American art story. Whether or non there was unanimous agreement on the importance of folk fine art in that story, the category could no longer exist ignored. Cahill's compelling essay has shaped our thinking always since. In the more than fourscore years since the Art of the Common Man, there has not been another folk-art exhibition of such seminal importance.^xiv

Fig. 11. The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks (1780–1849), Bucks Canton, Pennsylvania, 1832- 1834. Oil on canvass, 17 1/4 by 23 ane/four inches. "The freshness, the unexpectedness," of The Peaceable Kingdom "appear to exist the result of something which artists are always striving for-innocence and intensity of vision-far more than they are an expression of na ivete," wrote Cahill. "And in that location is, also, something else here which is of great importance to the gimmicky artist- structure equally firm and logical as that of the carriages upon which Edward Hicks worked as an amateur." Colonial Williamsburg Collections from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Collection, gift of David Rockefeller.

I would like to thank Laura Pass Barry, Juli Grainger Curator of Paintings, Drawings, and Sculpture, Colonial Williamsburg, for her help in researching the files at AARFAM; and Ruth Wolfe, contained writer, editor, and lecturer, for her help in thinking about this article.

The illustrations for this article have been chosen from amid those Holger Cahill selected for illustration in the catalogues to his two Newark exhibitions and the Common Man exhibition and that he discussed in the texts of the exhibition catalogues and in the many lectures he gave on the discipline of folk art during the 1930s.

1 The two works that did not belong to Mrs. Rockefeller were Primitive Horse, a wood carving and so in Cahill's collection, and The Buffalo Hunter, a painting that Cahill and Dorothy Miller discovered, probably in York, Pennsylvania. Miller and Cahill couldn't beget it and recommended it to Edith Halpert, who caused the painting for the American Folk Art Gallery (AFAG). Miller recollected that "it was non catalogued in the 1932 exhibition equally it was a last-minute addition to the show." Dorothy C. Miller to Mabel Swan, July xv, 1957, D. C. Miller papers, box xx, "American Folk Art/Correspondence, etc., 1943-68" folder, Archives of American Fine art (AAA). 2 Unless otherwise noted, information in this and the post-obit paragraphs is from Elizabeth Stillinger, A Kind of Archæology: Collecting American Folk Art, 1876-1976 (University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 2011), parts 2 and 3.3 Cahill was sometimes accompanied on his scouting trips by Halpert or Miller, whom he had met at the Newark Museum in the mid-1920s and whom he married in 1938. Both women sometimes went folk-art foraging for the AFAG solitary, as well. iv Carolyn J. Weekley interview with Elinor Robinson Bradshaw, Williamsburg, Virginia, Oct 25, 1984, transcript in East. Robinson file, BTR "Collector" files, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum (AARFAM), Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia. Holger Cahill to Alice Winchester, January 18, 1951, Cahill papers, box 5, first correspondence folder (A-F), AAA. 5 Abby Aldrich Rockefeller to Nelson Rockefeller, July xvi, 1932; Nelson Rockefeller to Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, July 18, 1932; A. Conger Goodyear to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., July viii, 1932; all AARFAM files, courtesy Laura Laissez passer Barry. half dozen A. Conger Goodyear to Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, December 12, 1932, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller papers, tape group 2, OMR, series I, AAR correspondence, box 7, folder 101, Rockefeller Annal Eye, Sleepy Hollow, New York. seven Nov 29, 1932, Cahill papers, box four, clippings folder, AAA. 8 The itinerary for the exhibition was the Pennsylvania (now Philadelphia) Museum of Art, Feb four to March 4, 1933; Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Apr i to April 30, 1933; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, October 10 to November v, 1933; William Rockhill Nelson Gallery (now Nelson-Atkins Museum) of Fine art, Kansas Urban center, Missouri, March 1 to March 30, 1934; Greenwich Society of Artists, Greenwich, Connecticut, May 26 to June 11, 1934; and the Westchester Community County Center (now the Westchester County Eye), White Plains, New York, June 20 to July 9, 1934. From January sixteen to March three, 1968, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Heart (now Museum) presented an exhibition entitled American Folk Art: The Exhibition of 1932, which the catalogue described as "A reassembly of the showtime exhibition of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller'south collection of American folk art held at the Museum of Modern Fine art from November thirty, 1932, until January xv, 1933." The catalogue includes a cursory history of Mrs. Rockefeller's folk art collection by Peter A. G. Brownish, then AARFAC's managing director, excerpts from Holger Cahill's original Mutual Man catalogue essay, and a checklist of the 150 objects on view. There are no illustrations except for four color plates-i of the exterior of the museum, Washington and Lafayette at the Battle of Yorktown, Infant in Red Chair, and The Peaceable Kingdom by Edward Hicks. 9 Philadelphia Public Ledger, Feb 5, 1933, Cahill papers, box 4, clippings folder, AAA. ten Holger Cahill, Maximilien Gauthier, Jean Cassou, Dorothy C. Miller, et al., Masters of Popular Painting: Modern Primitives of Europe and America (New York, 1938), p. 100. 11 "American Folk Fine art," The American Mercury, vol. 24 (September 1931), p. 42. 12 Holger Cahill, "American Folk Art," The Art of the Common Man (Museum of Modern Fine art, New York, 1932), p. 16. 13 Ibid., p. 7. fourteen Ibid., p. three. Holger Cahill connected to advise, collect for, and work with Abby Rockefeller on her folk art collection after the close of the Mutual Man prove, and he helped her select more 250 objects from her collection to lend to Colonial Williamsburg. These objects, accompanied by a brochure Cahill wrote, went on showroom at the Ludwell Paradise House in Williamsburg in March 1935. That same year Cahill became head of the Federal Fine art Projection of the WPA and in that capacity presided over the Index of American Design, which he described every bit "a pictorial history of the everyday features of a nation'due south culture, filled with intimate details of changing manners and community" (typescript, Cahill papers, AAA).

ELIZABETH STILLINGER is a writer, researcher, and editor whose latest book is A Kind of Archeology: Collecting American Folk Fine art 1876–1976.

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