Harold Bell Wright

Harold Bell Wright, 1902

I've written many times about famous artists who gave up promising careers in other fields to pursue their greatest love, often at the expense of their families and their own financial well being. Gauguin gave up his life as a well-to-do stockbroker to paint. Although he was never very successful at it, Van Gogh was once a minister and art dealer. Cezanne once studied law before turning to painting. Kandinsky also switched from law to art. Those are just a few.  On the other hand, we don't think about them so often, but there are probably thousands with the reverse story to tell. In fact, we all no doubt know some stories like this quite intimately. In some cases, they could even be our own stories. In Rome, New York, in 1872, began such a story. His name was Harold Bell Wright. He was the second of four boys, and his first love was painting. Although he was largely self-taught, he was pretty good at it. When he was eleven, his mother died, leaving him and his brothers to an uncaring, alcoholic father. Wright left home a year later, bouncing between relatives and flop houses. His schooling was sporadic at best. He more or less painted his way across the country, selling his landscapes and painting signs, enough to pay for supplies and keep body and soul together.

The church in Pierce City, Missouri,
where Write preached his first sermon.

Eventually, as a young man, he ended up in Missouri. He was a friendly, likable, somewhat talkative chap with a gift for storytelling. The elders of a nearby church asked him to come speak. And so, early one Sunday morning in 1896, he mounted his horse, rode 25 miles across the prairie to a small, white, wooden chapel, and there, in front of fewer than a dozen people, he found his true calling. He never set out to become a preacher. For his efforts, he earned eight dollars a week--small compensation even by artist's standards. But the effect he had upon his tiny, but growing, congregation in Pierce City, Missouri, and more important, the effect they had upon him eventually saw his audience grow from dozens to millions. He continued to paint a little, to preach, and most of all to write. Though critical of denominationalism, and despite a general lack of training in public speaking, his homespun Christian values and front-porch humor made his early efforts a success. After a year, he was invited to become pastor of a much larger Pittsburgh, Kansas, church; and it was while there that his first novel, That Printer of Udell's was written.

Ronald Reagan's copy
of Wright's first book

The book was published in 1902 and was really little more than a compilation of many of his better sermons. At the same time, Wright had also become quite an accomplished artist, painting murals in several Midwestern churches. In 1909, his second book, The Calling of Dan Matthews was published.  It was then that Wright decided, once and for all, to give up art. He did so in dramatic fashion. He carried out every single canvas, painting, tube of paint, and brush from his studio, heaping everything into a big pile and torched the lot of it. The supplies alone, apart from any artistic value in the paintings, amounted to over $500. Fortunately some of his work still survives (bottom). What also survives are 17 additional literary works including his most popular, Shepherd of the Hills. The book sold millions of copies, was translated into several languages, and came out of Hollywood in four different films. In 1927, Vanity Fair Magazine called him one of the top six most influential "Voices in America." Former President Ronald Reagan credits Wright's books with his own decision to become a baptized Christian. Several individuals have had significant effects upon their times and ours, having chosen to devote themselves to art, but few have had such effects in giving up art for a nobler, more powerful cause.

Painting by Harold Bell Wright, before 1909

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1853, Francis Holl

When the name of Harriet Beecher Stowe is mentioned, the next mention is almost always that of her greatest novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Blamed (or credited) with having single-handedly started the Civil War with her book by no less an authority on the subject that Abraham Lincoln himself, this talented, intellectual, socially conscious, hardworking woman was the epitome of the long-suffering Christian wife and mother of the 19th century. Born in Connecticut in 1811, the daughter of Lyman Beecher, a powerful preacher and Congregational theologian, also the founder of the American Bible Society; she first served as a teacher at a women's academy in Cincinnati during the 1840s. It was there she came to know the evils of slavery firsthand. Her home was a station on the famous Underground Railroad. It was there also she met her theologian husband, Calvin Stowe, who was eleven years her senior. When he took up a teaching position at a college in Maine during the 1850s, she moved there with him and began writing and publishing, in serialized form, her Uncle Tom's Cabin while raising seven children (three of whom died young). The publication of the series in book form during the 1860s made her an internationally know author. The book sold 3000 copies the first day, 300,000 copies the first year, and eventually rose to a total of three million copies in twenty different languages (impressive even in this day and age).

An 1859 poster marking the launch of
Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Insofar as most people know Harriet Beecher Stowe, her life's story ended with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin. In fact, she lived to be 85 years old.  She died in 1896.  After the war, with the abolition of slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe still found plenty to write about. For the next thirty years, she produced almost one book per year. Having "freed the slaves" so to speak, she next turned her writing talents toward the emancipation of women. And it is in this context that this literary artist becomes interesting from a broader, artistic perspective. While she was an amateur painter at various times in her life, it was her book, American Women's Home (bottom, left, written in conjunction with her sister, Katherine) in which she better displayed her creative bent with its innovative designs aimed at freeing women from much of the household drudgery which had always enslaved them.

The Stowe Kitchen,

Not surprisingly, she started in the kitchen, making it smaller, more compact, and better organized. She was the first to separate the room into two distinct areas, segregating the intense heat of the cast iron stove of her day to a separate area behind sliding doors to form a cooking alcove, its walls lined with shelves to store cooking utensils as well as double as a pantry. The other half, a modest 9' X 9' area had a built-in sink with a dish drainer that could be folded over it to increase counter space. Shelves overhead held dishes and table service while beneath the counter was contained bins for bulk staples such as sugar, flour, salt, rye, and corn meal (above, left). The counter top was made up of separate, reversible surfaces for chopping vegetables and kneading dough. The sink came with two hand pumps, one for well water, the other for cistern water which could also be used to pump water to a reservoir in the attic to allow for running water in the upstairs bathroom (one of the first affordable home designs of the era to even include an indoor bathroom).

Stowe's "Christian House"

The house itself she dubbed the "Christian House," so indicated by the crosses on each of its four gables. It was story-and-a-half design of eclectic style, quite modest in proportions (a mere 43' X 25'), consisting on the ground floor of an entry foyer with stairs, drawing room, kitchen, dining room, and two small, roofed piazzas for outdoor living. Upstairs were two bedrooms and the innovative bath.  Inasmuch as the first "water closets" were just starting to come into use, Stowe also illustrated a design for what she called an "earth closet." This was a combining of the old familiar chamber pot with the addition of a wall-mounted bin of "kitty litter" or dried earth as she termed it, which could be sifted into the removable receptacle after each use. And although the device demanded a good deal more servicing, it had the "advantage" of not requiring indoor plumbing, the lead pipes of which were notoriously prone to freezing in winter and leaking all year around.

Stowe's American Woman's Home, 1873

And while the house lacked central heating, the two Franklin stoves and the behemoth kitchen cooking stove were all centrally located and fed into the same chimney. Also,  Stowe's design was perhaps the first of her era to include duct work for the introduction of fresh air into the family's living quarters, a feature she found dangerously lacking in professionally designed hotels, churches, restaurants, even steam ships of her day. Stowe's American Women's Home may not have been as popular as her first book, but if Uncle Tom's Cabin, was instrumental in freeing the slaves, there can be little doubt that Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Christian House" went a long way in helping to free the women of her day too.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Stowe's own home was
a bit more upscale than her "Christian House."

Hans Holbein

Hans Holbein (the elder) Self-Portrait

It's no secret in the fine arts that talent is genetic. It tends to run in families. Sometimes it's been known to skip a generation but many is the son or daughter, living in the shadow of an accomplished father or mother, who finds it an uphill struggle to match the greatness of the parent's work. In film, the Fonda family comes to mind. In painting, the Wyeth family; in music, the Bernsteins or the Gershwins; in architecture, the Wrights, I could go on and on. And in the majority of these cases, the offspring, while often exceptional, do not measure up to the success of the first generation. But it does happen. And when it does, for the father, it's a mixed blessing. On the one hand, every father wants to see his son succeed. Yet, think of the dismay of having your own outstanding work mistaken for that of your son.  That's exactly what happened to a hard working, really quite talented German artist during the Northern Renaissance.

Ambrosius and Hans Holbein (the younger),
silverpoint by Hans Holbein (the elder), 1511

His name was Hans Holbein. We've all heard the name, right? He's known today for his elegant portraits of a corpulent King Henry VIII of England. No, that's Hans Holbein the son. Art historians refer to him as Hans Holbein (the younger). This time we're talking about his father, Hans Holbein (the elder). His brother, Sigismund, was also a painter. He was born near Augsburg in German Bavaria about 1460. His father was a well-to-do leather worker who saw to it that his son studied with the great German painter, Schongauer. He married the daughter of a painter by the name of Brickmaer, and seems to have worked in several area cities of the time including, Ulm, Frankfort, Basle and Alsace. Records suggest that his travels may have been aimed at escaping indebtedness. In any case, his sons, Hans and Ambrosius (above, left), were born around 1500.  Both he trained to become painters.

Death of the Virgin, 1490, Hans Holbein (the elder)

The father's early work shows the influence of Roger van der Weyden, and then that of the Van Eycks. Later, picking up many Italian influences, he was the first German painter to soften his style, favoring the gentle, voluminous qualities of Mantegna and Perugino over the angular, linear style of Durer and others. Though he painted portraits, his best works are the numerous altarpieces he left scattered from Augsburg to Nuremberg. A particularly poignant one in Augsburg, painted around 1515 (photo unavailable), contains a self-portrait, along with likenesses of his two sons who may have helped him with the work. In it, the father points with pride to his namesake, perhaps realizing that his son already showed signs of surpassing him. Unbelievably, even before he died in 1520, indications are that papers were being forged to indicate work by the father had been done by the son.  It's the kind of thing than make fathers prematurely gray; and no doubt adds a little silver to the heads of art historians as well.

Goodwin's Williamsburg

W.A.R. Goodwin

We are sometimes tempted to believe that artists have a monopoly upon visionary images. But not all images are made with marks on paper or canvas. Some, seen in the mind's eye of their creator, take tangible, concrete shape in real life. Architects, for instance, get to see their visual images transferred first to paper then to great buildings. In Nelson County, Virginia, near the town of Norwood, just four years after the surrender of Lee and the Confederacy at Appomattox Courthouse, a child named for his father, William Goodwin, was born.  He was the son of a Confederate Army Captain. Raised in poverty in the Virginia hill country, William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin grew up to become an Episcopal minister and history scholar. In 1903, he was assigned to become rector of the Bruton Parish church in the small, backwater town of Williamsburg, Virginia.

It was not a choice assignment.  The church itself was becoming dilapidated, the town was, in many cases, already well passed that, and growing ever more so with each passing day. As the pastor took his customary evening stroll, he encountered images from the past, not unlike those of an artist, as the ghosts of the town's illustrious vintage days followed him everywhere. It had been 123 years since the state government of Virginia had pulled up stakes and moved to Richmond. The intervening years, the war, poverty, the Victorian era, modernization, had all left their mark on what had once been a collective masterpiece of Colonial architecture. Dr. Goodwin's vision was to stop history in its tracks, turn back its hands of time, and see the town restored to its quaint, colonial splendor.

The old Bruton Parish Church before restoration

He started with his own backyard, the church. Through his own hard work, good humor, and considerable powers of persuasion, he set about the raising of the funds to see the worshiping place of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, and George Washington returned to it's colonial state. But just as he was getting up a head of steam, he was transferred to Rochester, New York, for fifteen long years. When he had the good fortune to return as rector of Bruton Parrish in 1923, he found his worst nightmares of twenty years earlier had taken shape. The town had become an eyesore, utility poles marched up the middle of the main street, the old courthouse had become a "filling station" sported the sign "Toot-an-cum-in" (King Tut's tomb had just been unearthed in Egypt). There were modern concrete streets, sidewalks, street lights, while next to them, structural decay was everywhere. Many of the colonial era homes had simply vanished. A new school had been built where once stood the Governor's Palace. Fifteen years of the twentieth century and the Model T had done more to rip apart the tattered fabric of Colonial Williamsburg than had the whole century before. If his vision was to be realized, it had to happen fast.

Williamsburg's reconstructed Governor's Palace (rear). The site had once been that of
the town's high school, which was demolished.

Goodwin first went to one source of the problem, Henry Ford himself, who was known to be a history buff and one of the few men in the country wealthy enough to undertake such a project.  He was rebuffed by form letters and a newspaper headline: "HENRY FORD ASKED TO BUY ANCIENT VIRGINIA TOWN!" Then, in 1924, almost by accident, Goodwin spoke at a banquet in New York attended by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. One thing led to another and a few months later, Goodwin hosted the multimillionaire for a tour of the town, asking only for the means to buy one particularly important home in imminent danger of destruction, the Ludwell-Paradise House. It didn't happen. It was two more long years before, in 1926, John D. wrote the first check. The house was saved, and during the next twelve years, more checks followed, supporting an army of archaeologists, carpenters, masons, historians, decorators, and other miscellaneous restorationists.

A 1930s era postcard of Williamsburg's Capitol Building

Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin died in 1939, just days before the official kickoff of the Second World War, which effectively halted the restoration and reconstruction efforts for the duration. After the war, Rockefeller continued to support the project, and even lived nearby for the next twenty years until his death in 1960. Today, Colonial Williamsburg is a living, breathing work of art on a scale almost unimaginable at the turn of the century when Goodwin first glimpsed a dreaded future and opted for a vision of the past instead. Today, the restored area has grown to some 150 acres and nearly 85% of the original town. Along with similar efforts in neighboring Jamestown and Yorktown, a four-lane parkway that literally tunnels under the town connects the three, Carter's Grove plantation, and related tourist facilities to support the modern day visitor wishing to step back 250 years. The complex very clearly stands as one of the greatest works of art ever conceived and executed here or anywhere else in the world. And the recreative genius behind it all, Dr. W.A.R. Goodwin, deserves the title "artist" no less than Wright, Rodin, or Picasso.

Restored homes, Williamsburg today.

George Segal

George Segal, 1991, among the cast figures
for his Depression Bread Line.

Artists long ago learned the knack of seeing everyday objects and situations, then capturing them on paper or canvas for the ages following to ponder and enjoy. We have a much better understanding of seventeenth century life, for instance, as a result of Dutch, French, and later English still-life painting. And American, nineteenth century genre painting gives us a nostalgic view of everyday life in this country a century or more ago. In the 20th century, the elevation of the mundane, everyday symbols of our fast-paced cultural existence took on a much more blatantly hard edged tone with the advent of Pop Art in the early 1960s. Though most often associated with painting, Pop sculpture such as that of Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and others may have been even more effective in underlining, capturing, and preserving that which we were at the time. And with all due respect to the others, by far the most powerful sculptural statements in Pop Art belong to a chicken farmer from New Jersey by the name of George Segal...the guy with the plaster bandages, not the actor by the same name.

Depression Bread Line, 1991, George Segal, FDR Memorial, Washington, DC.
Segal modeled himself as the fourth figure in the line.

Segal came out of New York City (the Bronx). He was born in 1924. And much of his art is New York City born and bred. The chicken farm came when he was fifteen and his Jewish parents moved to rural New Jersey (when there still was such a thing). He studied art, art education, and architecture at Cooper Union, Rutgers, Pratt Institute, and NYU, all during the war and for several years afterwards. But when he married in 1946, he gave up painting in favor of what he knew best--chicken farming. He bought his own just down the road from that of his parents. And though he began teaching high school art in 1955, he continued in the business...the chicken business that is...until 1958 when sales of his paintings springing from his first one-man show in 1956, began to earn him a decent living as an artist.

The Holocaust, 1984, George Segal, Lincoln Park, San Francisco

But Abstract Expressionism never was his thing. In 1958, an art "happening" organized by fellow New York artist Allan Kaprow got Segal started doing sculpture. He used those things which he knew best...wood, chicken wire, burlap, and plaster in fabricating life-size human figures which he began installing in starkly realistic urban settings often jerked from real life with a chain saw or cutting torch. In 1961, technology came along and made his life easier with the invention of plaster-impregnated gauze bandages intended for doctors in making plaster casts. Segal began using them to make molds of real people which he then took apart and cast in plaster parts, rejoining them into ghostly white images often reflecting the surreal loneliness of American urban life. Later, he dispensed with the castings and began using the molds themselves to capture the essence of his figures minus the more delicate details. These were no less effective in rendering the eerie feeling on alienation of his earlier work. 

Street Crossing, 1992, George Segal, Montclair State University.
What appears to be plaster is really painted bronze.

Yearly solo shows followed all through the 60's and 70's as museums snapped up his work like the golden nuggets of corn on his chicken farm. He used friends and family for his models. A particularly personal piece depicted a slice of the Bronx kosher butcher shop his parents once owned, peopled by his ghostly, lifelike figures. His groupings often took on overtly political messages. His Holocaust Group is especially heart rending. For the FDR Memorial in Washington, he cast his plaster figures in bronze, including a life-size self-portrait standing with others in a Depression Bread Line (top two photos). In later years, Segal's work diversified, as he and it began to shrug off the "Pop" label. And though he never again taught high school, several colleges and universities, and countless students were the beneficiaries of his experience, insights, and technical prowess. A 1998 traveling retrospective of his life's work and a National Medal of Arts in 1999 forever cemented his place in the art history books as not just one of the top Pop Art icons of all time, but one of America's most important sculptors. He died in 2002 at the age of 75.

Circus Acrobats, 1981, George Segal

George Inness



George Inness, 1890

As artist, we revel in freedom. It's considered the life's blood of art. Unfettered creativity is such a heady experience we often talk about it in awe approaching some kind of mystical, spiritual, even religious occurrence. As artists, we point with elation at some of the works painters have created from within themselves with little or no outside influence. Artists of independent means with no need for patronage, perhaps not even a desire for artistic acceptance, such a Paul Cezanne, have produced works which have changed the course of art in the western world. But I'm here to tell you they are the exception, rather than the rule. Ninety percent of all art is produced under conditions involving some outside restrictions imposed upon the artist, either in terms of his or her need to earn a living from their art, or by a client commissioning a work of art, or by social, religious, or governmental restrictions upon that which they may produce. And I suggest that in very many cases, the best of all the art ever produced came about not in spite of these restrictions but because of them. 

The Lackawanna Valley, 1855, George Inness

In 1855, the president of the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad Company commissioned the Philadelphia artist, George Inness to do a painting of the fledgling company's roundhouse, railways, and rolling stock. Inness needed the money but as primarily a landscape and figurative painter, he was less than delighted at the prospect of painting the hardware and real estate of an organization he considered responsible for raping the natural rural beauty of the countryside he loved so much. He painted a lush landscape with spreading hills a bucolic farmer, and a single locomotive chugging its way through the lovely Pennsylvania farmlands. The painting (now apparently lost), was rejected. Inness was forced back to the drawing board and obliged to compromise. His second effort, The Lackawanna Valley, 1855 (above), depicts much of the same beauty but with the town of Scranton in the misty middle ground, the roundhouse situated on the edge of town, with a graceful curve of track and the white steam-spewing locomotive (notice, no dirty black smoke) making its way across the tranquil landscape. The result is not only a far more interesting painting, but one that says something about the age in which it was created and the forces coming to bear on its creator. And today, in an age of urban sprawl and endless concrete ribbons, the train is seen as a quaint, benign reminder of days gone by, not as some sort of monstrous iron rapist.

Inness also painted extensively in Italy as seen
in this distant view of St. Peter's Rome, 1856.

Would Michelangelo's Sistine ceiling have been as impressive painted on canvas? Would Wright's Fallingwater have been as powerful built on a Mississippi flood plain? Would the Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty have as much meaning in the middle of a Kansas cornfield? Would the Gettysburg Address be memorized today by school children if Lincoln has droned on for an hour? Restrictions impose discipline upon an artist, regardless of the medium. They demand that the artist work at his or her concept. And in effect, they cause the artist to rise above the subject at hand to strive for greatness, not just the first workable depiction. Even in the hands of a great artist, unlimited creativity often results in mundane art. But, by the same token, in the hands of a mundane artist, restrictions can choke off creativity, resulting in no art. As an art educator, I often saw this. A student's first ten solutions were usually garbage. They werer the obvious paths. It's only after these have been gently rejected with the admonishment, "You can do better," that genius is uncovered. "Make me some art," is likely to drown even a good artist in possibilities not to mention inviting mediocrity. "Paint in oils, that which you fear most, on this 18"x24" canvas board using only white, two primary colors, and their corresponding secondary," builds a sheltering enclosure with known limits in which the artist feels secure to ponder the possibilities.

Frederic Bazille

Frederic Bazille Self-Portrait,
1865-66

Whether as children on a playground or as adults in some weightier dispute, we've all no doubt uttered the words, "That's not fair." The counter to that is always the question, "Who ever said life was fair?"  Indeed, even from birth, some people have it all, while others seem short changed from the first slap on the bare derriere. The same is true near the end of life. There are those who live in misery far beyond their years and those who "die young and leave a good-looking corpse." In either case, it's just not fair. In 1841, there was born in the south of France near the fashionable resort town of Montpelier, a child, the son of wealthy wine producers. They named him Frederic. As a boy he became interested in art in seeing the work of Gustave Courbet and Eugene Delacroix at the home of a family friend and art collector, Alfred Bruyas. As a young man, he studied for two years at the Ecole des Beaux-arts under the tutelage of Charles Gleyre. It would seem that Frederic Bazille (pronounced Ba-ZEE-ah) was never  far from the "silver spoon" of his birth.

The Pink Dress, 1864, Frederic Bazille

As befitting a bright young man of means, Bazille's interest in art was seen by his family as a mere avocation, something to amuse him until he managed to pass the medical exams to become a doctor. Except that (whether by accident or design), well...he never did manage to pass them. He actually flunked twice, the third time he was merely late (and was thus closed out). Relenting, his family finally came around to letting him study art full time. It was in Gleyre's studio where Bazille met Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, and Alfred Sisley. The four of them became kind of a clique, not the most endearing group to have in class, nor the most dedicated art students either. They would delight in cutting classes to go peek in the window of the studio of the aged Delacroix to watch him work. During Easter break, 1863, the four of them took off for the Forest of Fontainebleau where they tried painting out-of-doors. Guess what? It was fun.  They liked it. Their little alliance was to form the core of the group of artists destined to be called Impressionists.

Family on the Terrace, 1867-68, Frederic Bazille

Not only was Bazille a painting partner to Monet and Renoir, he was something of a lifeline as well.  Both his friends came from much less fortunate circumstances than did he. He often loaned them money (usually amounting to an outright gift) as well as shared studio space with them (paying the bulk of the rent, of course). In return he learned from them. As a painter, he lacked the brilliance of either of his friends. His work, such as The Pink Dress (above, left), painted in 1864 is light and sensitive, impressionistic, but not such that one might single it out as exceptional. Bazille favored the figure over the landscapes of his friends, and though he sometimes painted both indoor and outdoor scenes largely devoid of people, it was at portraiture and the effects of natural light upon his figures at which he most excelled. His enormous, 1867 Family on the Terrace (above) is often considered his best. Knowing great good fortune from the beginning of life, and great promise in art during his life, makes the end of his life doubly tragic. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out, the adventurous young man enlisted in the colorful Zouave cavalry. He was killed fighting at Beaune-la-Rolande near Orleans on November 28, 1870. He was 29. It would seem, the silver spoon of his birth was not bullet proof. It's just not fair.