User:Rgeilfuss

User:Rgeilfuss/draft article on Samuel Addison Shute and Ruth Whittier Shute Samuel Addison Shute (1803-1836) and Ruth Whittier Shute (1803-1882) were a unique husband and wife team of itinerant portrait painters active in New England and New York State during the 1830s. Samuel was a professional physician, a free mason, and an orator as well as a painter. He married his wife in 1827. Together they painted many portraits, some of which are now in celebrated collections, such as those of the American Folk Art Museum’s and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s.

Many of their portraits depict young working class women who had migrated from their family homes to work in the textile mills that were then a vibrant part of the industrial economy of New England. After Samuel Addison Shute died in 1836 while still in his early 30’s, his widow moved to Lexington, Kentucky, where she continued to paint for another 45 years.

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/Joseph H. Davis (active 1832-1837). Over a period of only five years, from 1832-37, the itinerant artist Joseph H. Davis painted about 150 watercolor portraits of residents of Maine and New Hampshire. Little is known about the artist’s life: he was only identified by art historians in 1989. Yet the body of work he left behind is highly regarded for its calligraphic line, miniaturizing delicacy, and expert stylization. His pictures are in many important collections, including those of the American Folk Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Terra Foundation of American art.

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/William L. Hawkins (1895-1990) was a self-taught black American artist. His celebrated works are in many important collections, including that of the American Folk Art Museum.

Hawkins was born on farmland outside of Lexington, Kentucky. In 1916, at the onset of the Great Migration, he moved north across the Ohio River to Columbus, apparently in order to avoid a shotgun wedding. There he worked a number of menial jobs, with opportunities limited by racism and his lack of formal education. Although he had been curious about art since childhood, it was only upon retirement that Hawkins began his second life as an artist.

The artist worked in multiple styles, revealing a wide-ranging talent as a modern painter. He might treat the picture plane as an architectural façade, as in similar work by Jean Dubuffet, or it could give way to a plunging perspective in grisaille, with the uninviting landscape conjuring memories of a difficult history (which suggests the influence of Anselm Kiefer), as in Hawkins’s Dust Bowl Collage from the year before his death. But unlike in the work of these two European influences, the American vernacular of color registers unmistakably in Hawkins’s work, with color magazine photographs functioning rather like fantastical digressions within his pictures, disrupting the internal unity of style.

==References==

American Anthem, pp. 399-400

/Lucina Hudson (1787-?) was an American folk artist. She attended Abby Wright’s School in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she made the needlework for which she is remembered. This “Liberty Needlework” of 1808 is in the collection of the American Folk Art Museum. It features an allegorical representation of Liberty as a graceful yet robust female, holding a cornucopia (testifying to the fruitfulness of the new republic) and a version of the national flag, artistically modified with different colors and capped by a pileus, which, as the hat that marked manumitted slaves in Greece, was itself symbol of liberty.

==References==

American Anthem pp. 303-4

/Morris Hirshfield, 1876-1946, was a successful textile manufacturer in New York, best known today for his work as a self-taught artist. His art is in many important collections, including those of the American Folk Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (both in New York City).