Clementine Hunter (pronounced Clementeen) was born to Creole parents, Antoinette Adams and Janvier Reuben, in late December of 1886 or early January of 1887 at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana. Hunter would never learn to read or write, later saying she only had about ten days of schooling, and was put to work in the fields when she was very young. At 15, she left Hidden Hill, which is considered to have been the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin and is today known as Little Eva Plantation, for Melrose Plantation, where she would change her name from Clemence to Clementine.

At Melrose, she would pick cotton and give birth to her first two children. After their father died in 1914, she married Emmanuel Hunter in 1924 and the couple remained at Melrose, where they both worked. She would give birth to another five children, two of whom were stillborn, picking cotton until the day before she gave birth and returning to the fields shortly thereafter. By her mid-30s, Clementine would begin to work as a cook and housekeeper. She would never travel more than 100 miles from home.

By the 1930s, Melrose Plantation had begun to be something of an artist colony, and when New Orleans artist Alberta Kinsey left behind brushes and tubes of paint, Hunter painted her first picture – on a window shade. Her work would come to the attention of the plantation’s curator, Francois Mignon, and in addition to supplying her with materials, Mignon would help Hunter get her work displayed locally. They would later collaborate on a Melrose Plantation cookbook.

A color photograph of artist Clementine Hunter (Louisiana), in a blue smock holding a rooster. (p4A item # D9957218)

Hunter continued to paint, often producing artwork on any scraps she could find, from paper bags to window shades to jugs, hanging a sign outside her cabin that charged “25 cents to Look.” Her works illustrated the daily life of the early 20th-century plantation – picking cotton or pecans, doing chores, commemorating baptisms or weddings – and as such make valuable socioeconomic and cultural contributions as well as artistic ones. She was a prolific painter, creating an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 works between the late 1930s and her death on January 1, 1988, but her work is also considered uneven, likely because so many pieces were created in haste and because she continued to live in poverty most of her life, so values for her work can vary widely. Works from the 1940s and 50s are typically considered her best works.

Clementine Hunter (American/Louisiana, 1886-1988) oil on canvas board painting, “Pecan Pickin’”, circa 1955. (p4A item # E8882656)

In the 1940s, Hunter sold work for as little as a single quarter and by the late 1970s, she was selling pieces for several hundred dollars. By the time of her death in 1988, dealers were selling her works for thousands of dollars. Fame did find her late in life, with Hunter landing a solo exhibition, the first African-American artist to do so, at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art). She received an invitation to the White House from Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and would receive an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree from Northwestern State University of Louisiana in 1986.

Hunter’s work is naive and simplistic enough in nature that there have been instances of forgery. This is complicated by the fact that she painted on a wide variety of materials, rarely titled her works, and because they were originally sold from her front door for pocket change, there is rarely anything resembling a firm provenance. Her work also tends to sell in a price range that makes forgeries easy enough to pass off – they can sell cheaply enough without drawing suspicion and they tend to sell in a price point where buyers are often less likely to do or demand research and are unlikely to spend the funds for a full authentication.
Reference Note by p4A editorial staff, 2011.

Artist Note Courtesy of Rago Arts, October, 2019:

The descendant of enslaved people, Clementine Hunter was born in the Cane River region of central Louisiana at Hidden Hill, the infamous plantation said to have inspired Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She worked for most of her life on the Melrose cotton plantation. A self-taught artist and one of the field’s best-known, she didn’t start painting until she was in her 50s. After work, Hunter recorded everyday plantation life from memory, whether picking cotton in the fields or baptisms and funerals. Her palette is bright, her faces usually dark in tone and without expression. She disregards perspective and scale. Her earlier work was on found material; she graduated to canvas and board when patrons gave her art supplies and orders for specific images which she often repeated on request. Her signature changed over the years from “Clemence” to “C H” to “CH” to a backward “C” superimposed over the letter “H”. This is considered a fairly reliable method by which to date her paintings. Though she first exhibited in 1949, Hunter did not garner public attention until the 1970s when both the Museum of American Folk Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibited her work. Even with success, Hunter chose to stay in Louisiana, working at Melrose Plantation until it was (ironically) sold at auction in 1970. She lived out her days in a small trailer a few miles away. The sale stripped Melrose of many Hunter murals that adorned its buildings. Her African House Murals, painted in 1955, were preserved, and can be seen at the African House at Melrose Plantation, now a named National Historical Landmark.

Timothy O’Sullivan immigrated to New York City from Ireland with his parents when he was a small child and it was there that he later found work in Mathew Brady’s photography studio. (Brady, who was afflicted with vision problems that struck when he was still a young man, depended heavily on the talent he found in recruits like O’Sullivan and Alexander Gardner.) While O’Sullivan appears to have said he was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Civil War, this does not seem to be confirmed in the records, but he was photographing during the war and by 1862 was certainly working for Mathew Brady as part of Brady’s crew of field photographers.

O’Sullivan spent much of 1862 in northern Virginia and would eventually begin working with Alexander Gardner, who had left Brady to work on his own. Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War (1866) would include 44 of O’Sullivan’s photographs, including perhaps his best known image, one of the many he took of the Gettysburg Battlefield, called “The Harvest of Death,” a view of a field somehow chilling in its prosaicism, the idea that it could be any field, anywhere, spread with bodies in all directions as far as the camera’s eye can see. He would also photograph other important events like the sieges of Petersburg and Fort Fisher and Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

While O’Sullivan is perhaps best known for his Civil War work, some of his most magnificent work would be done as an expedition photographer. He traveled with the U.S. Geological Exploration of the 40th Parallel (1867 to 1869), recording the landscape across the frontier. While the official goal was to produce images that would inspire settlers to head west, O’Sullivan also took beautiful images of Native American Indians, their occupations and villages, as well as some of the prehistoric ruins through the Southwest. He would also work with one of the first crews to survey the Panamanian Isthmus for a canal before returning to the American West with the Wheeler Expedition (1871 to 1874). (The trip faced a number of calamities, including the loss of supplies and several boats, which also meant the loss of a number of O’Sullivan’s images.) He would be retained by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Treasury Department as an official photographer upon his return to Washington, but would die in 1882 at just 42 from tuberculosis.

O’Sullivan’s photographs are highly collectible, with, as with all photography, condition and subject matter playing a significant role. Albumen images from the Civil War can bring in excess of $1,000 at auction, while collections of the stereoview photographs taken on the Wheeler Expedition can fetch considerably more.

The word “Hoosier” is one of those words whose origins are lost to time. Even The Oxford English Dictionary offers no real guidance about where the word came from. What we do know is that “Hoosier” was first documented in the mid-1820s, and within a decade, it had entered general usage. John Finley, a Hoosier himself from Richmond, write a poem titled, “The Hoosier’s Nest” that was published in 1833, although his initial version uses “Hoosher.” This usage, along with many others from the period, indicate that Hoosier was most likely in oral usage for quite some time, as there appears to be no need to explain the term once it appears in print usage.

Speculation about the origins of the word began almost immediately, and a number of theories have been offered over the years. Perhaps the most widely accepted of these is from historian Jacob Piatt Dunn, Jr. Dunn pins the word’s origins on an old English dialect and the root “hoo,” which means high ground or a hill. Early usage of the word is not so specific to Indiana, but rather seems to refer to a backwoodsman or a mountain man – the kind of rough, hardy people who populated the early Appalachian frontier. For details and other theories, check out the Indiana Historical Bureau’s website and their article, “What is a Hoosier?” at http://www.in.gov/history/2612.htm.

With that out of the way, we can talk about the one of the other widespread Hoosier terms – the Hoosier cupboard. Hoosier cupboards are easily explained. By the end of the 1800s, kitchens were becoming more modern, and furniture was taking on more specific forms, moving from multipurpose forms to forms more specific to areas and purposes in the home (tables vs. dining tables, work tables, breakfast tables, etc.). As kitchens became more modern, they began to demand more specific forms, and one of the most practical examples of this was a flat-wall cupboard with a flour bin for 50 pounds of flour along one side, cupboards across the top for dry goods, a pull-out work surface – often enamel or porcelain – for kneading bread or rolling pastry crusts, all over drawers and cabinets beneath for utensils, mixing bowls and other dishes. The Hoosier Manufacturing Company was founded in 1898 (some sources say 1903), and they went on to produce cupboards or cabinets of such quality in such quantity that the word became a generic trademark – just like Kleenex or Q-Tip today. Hoosier cupboards (and Hoosier-style cupboards), models of efficiency, represent the transition between the antique wooden cupboards and the modern kitchen with its laminated countertops.

A Hoosier-style oak cabinet with flour bin and enameled work surface. (p4A item # D9807041)

-Reference note by Hollie Davis, p4A Senior Editor – June 21, 2009

Further Recommended Reading

The Hoosier Cabinet in Kitchen History by Nancy R. Hiller

Although one of the most prolific and successful photographers of the 19th century, little is known of D.F. Barry’s life, at least the early years. We do know that he was born in upstate New York, near Rochester, on March 6, 1954, and when he was seven, his family moved west to Wisconsin. Around the age of sixteen, he was hired for a short time to assist O.S. Goff, an itinerant photographer, and somehow, the relationship was rekindled years later in 1878 as Goff again hired Barry, this time as an apprentice for his Dakota Territory photography studio in Bismarck.

Over the next few years, Barry devoted himself to his craft, and his skills can only be reflected in his progress in Goff’s business from apprentice to business partner. By the mid-1870s, he was ready to strike out, and he began traveling west with a portable studio, one of a number of photographers who perhaps had a sense of the dramatic erosion Native American culture was experiencing and who sought to capture people of the various tribes on film. Between the mid-1870s and 1883, Barry visited a number of forts throughout the Dakotas and Montana, including Forts Buford, Yates and Assinniboine.

D.F. Barry cabinet card of Chief Gall, whose image later became a sketched logo of sorts for Barry and was included on the backs of his images. (p4A item # D9740560)

He photographed Native American men and women, frontier scouts, soldiers, trappers and other pioneers, truly recording the panorama of folks who populated the American West at the time, as well as the forts and battlefields of the Plains Wars. (Barry developed a very close relationship with the Sioux, who nicknamed him ‘Little Shadow Catcher.’) The catalogue of his subjects is a veritable list of who’s who on the high plains at the end of the 19th century with many of them having been involved in the Battle of Little Bighorn: Sitting Bull, George Armstrong Custer, Rain in the Face, Chief Gall, Red Cloud, and many others. He even took photographs of the aftermath of Little Bighorn and was, years later, the only photographer invited back to photograph the reunion on the battlefield. In later years, he also photographed the taming of the Wild West by recording images of Buffalo Bill Cody, Annie Oakley and others who traveled as part of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.

A D.F. Barry silver gelatin photograph of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull. (p4A item # D9877563)

By 1890, Barry moved east again, opening a studio in Superior, Wisconsin, where he continued to take photographs while marketing his photographs from his days in the Dakotas. Aside from a brief period of time in New York, Barry remained in Superior for the remainder of his life, dying there on March 6, 1934. The Denver Public Library owns Barry’s original negatives and his collection of prints.

Hollie Davis, p4A Senior Editor, January 7, 2010

Tagua nuts are the endosperm of a genus of South American palm trees that are found from Panama down through Bolivia and Peru. Tagua nuts, or more accurately, the kernels of tagua seeds, are left behind by the wildlife that feed on the palm’s fruit. The group of palms is often referred to as “tagua palms” or “ivory-nut palms,” because tagua nuts are so hard, they resemble elephant ivory. (In fact, the scientific name given to these plants translates as “plant elephant.”)

A tagua nut snuff box with a carved scene of a hunter and his dog. (p4A item # D9676071)

Elephant ivory has long been either expensive, difficult or simply distasteful to possess, and thus tagua nuts have often been used as an acceptable substitute. The nuts take dye relatively well, and can be carved just like ivory for beads, buttons, and other small decorative objects. The nuts shrink as they dry and harden, and occasionally, small cavities will form inside them. Since there’s no way to know whether or not a tagua nut will have a cavity before carving, carvings that use the whole nut are typically extremes – either very deep with designs that allow for the possibility or flatter and more shallow relief decoration.

Hollie Davis, p4A Senior Editor, August 11, 2009

Alexander Gardner was born in Paisley, Scotland on October 17, 1821. As a young man, he was interested in socialist ideas, especially the concept of cooperatives, the creation of a business venture operated by and to serve the needs of a particular group with a common interest. After the family moved to Glasgow, Gardner apprenticed himself to a jeweler and silversmith at the age of 14. After reading about the New Harmony cooperative community established in Indiana by Welsh socialist Robert Owen and his son Robert Dale Owen, Gardner helped establish the Clydesdale Joint Stock Agricultural and Commercial Company, with the goal of purchasing land in the United States where the members could form another cooperative community.

By 1850, the company had purchased land in Iowa, but Gardner never lived there, instead continuing to work in Scotland to raise more funds. By 1856, after five years as the owner and editor of the Glasgow Sentinel, a struggling paper that he had transformed into a huge success, Gardner opted to move his family – his mother, his wife and their two children – to the United States. However, after discovering that the Iowa community was battling tuberculosis and that many of his friends and family there were sick or dead, he opted to settle in New York.

Gardner’s interest in photography was born after a visit to the Crystal Palace Exhibition in London in 1851, where he encountered the photographs of American photographer Mathew Brady. He began to dabble in photography himself and to write about it in the Glasgow Sentinel, and in 1856, he contacted Brady in Washington, D.C. where he was operating a studio. Brady welcomed the opportunity to expand his presence in New York, and Gardner, fast becoming a great talent with the wet plate collodion process that was replacing daguerreotypes, was a perfect choice. His specialty was the large ‘Imperial’ plates, 17 by 20, and they commanded huge prices in the era with some selling for as much as $750.

By 1858, a relatively short time after beginning his relationship with Brady, Gardner had evidently impressed his employer so much that Brady asked him to move to Washington, D.C., where he would eventually oversee the gallery there until he became involved in war photography. Both men were perfectly positioned to capture the historic moments of the coming years, and the gallery flourished during the early years of the war, gaining a reputation for portraiture and thriving with the patronage of the high-profile, high-ranking military officials who visited the city and the vast numbers of soldiers under their command. Gardner is especially known for his photographs of Lincoln, capturing an image of the sixteenth president on the battlefield at Antietam and taking various portraits during Lincoln’s years in Washington. He also took the last known images of Lincoln, four days before his assassination, and documented the aftermath, photographing both the funeral proceedings and the assassination conspirators.

A silver print copy of Gardner’s final portrait of Lincoln, taken four days before his death. (p4A item # D9899713)

With photography still in the glass plate stage, Brady photographers like Gardner moved around in traveling darkrooms that were fully equipped to develop images. When one considers the conditions, Gardner’s Civil War photographs become all the more amazing. Later in the war, he traveled with Gen. Ambrose Burnside and Gen. Joseph Hooker, photographing events at Fredericksburg and Petersburg as well as the seminal battles at Antietam and Gettysburg, and in 1863, Gardner and his brother opened their own studio.

Almost a century later, Gardner’s photographs again created a stir when research by Frederic Ray indicated that several of Gardner’s Civil War images of two Confederate snipers were indeed just one sniper whose body was moved for the purposes of achieving a more dramatic position. Gardner and his assistants moved the body approximately 40 yards to get the photograph known as Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter. Evidence indicates that posing and arranging photographs was probably commonplace in the early days of the craft, and while modern scholars may be disappointed, viewers in the period would likely not have been bothered by this knowledge.

A stereoview image of Gardner’s Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter. (p4A item # D9934454)

Gardner’s albumen image of the hanging of Lincoln conspirators on July 7, 1865. (p4A item # D9889980)

A Gardner’s photograph of an Indian burial site from Scenes in the Indian Country. (p4A item # D9927541)

Gardner’s images remain very popular among collectors today, not only because of their quality and technical skill, but because of the historic moments they captured. Prices for his work can range from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands (a copy of his Civil War volumes brought in excess of $86,000 p4A item # D9890316), and the value depends greatly on subject matter and condition.

Hollie Davis, p4A Senior Editor, August 12, 2009

In the early 1800s, great herds of bison containing upwards of 50 million animals wandered over North America’s prairies. By the 1880s, most had been slaughtered, and the species was in danger of extinction. In 1873, a Pend d’Oreille Indian by the name of Walking Coyote returned to the Flathead Valley from a hunting trip with a small group of young, orphaned bison calves. When he had approximately 13 buffalo, Walking Coyote sold them to Charles A. Allard and Michael Pablo, two ranchers. At that time, there were less than 125 buffalo in both the United States and Canada.

A Forsyth stereoview of the herd in the process of being relocated to Canada. (p4A item # D9804957)

Over time, the Allard and Pablo herd became one of the largest in existence. Allard’s heirs sold their portion of the herd to Charles Conrad of Kalispell, creating the foundation of the Bison Range herd that exists today. Pablo attempted to sell his share to the U.S. government, but after a lukewarm response, he offered them to the Canadian government. Fortunately, news of the sale angered the American public and led to the creation of the American Bison Society. The Society worked with the Smithsonian, Theodore Roosevelt, and Congress to set aside three parcels of land between 1907 and 1909 to create what is known today as the Bison Range to bring the bison back from the edge of extinction. Today, there are more than 140,000 bison in North America.

Information courtesy of Cowan’s Auctions, http://www.cowanauctions.com.

Additional research by Hollie Davis, p4A Senior Editor, June 25, 2010.