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A GENTLEMAN WITH A NEWSPAPER AND LANDSCAPE AND A LADY WITH A BOOK, PAINTED CHEST AND BOWL OF FRUIT: A PAIR OF PORTRAITS OF MR. AND MRS. JOHN CALHOUN OF CHICAGO

measurements
28 by 26.5 in.

alternate measurements
71.1 by 67.3 cm

The portrait depicts Mr. John Calhoun, founder and editor of the Chicago Democrat, seated on a painted and decorated chair dressed in a fine, dark green topcoat and holding a newspaper marked "Chicago" and dated 1838. In the background, a wonderful rural landscape representing the newly forged frontier may be seen through an opening at the left of the canvas. A freshly felled tree stump is in the foreground before a cabin with a smoking chimney at the river's edge. In the distance, a sailboat and another cabin may be seen before the mountains.

The companion portrait depicts Mrs. Calhoun, seated in a fine black dress with lace collar and cap holding a prayer book. She sits before a painted and decorated chest of drawers with yellow drawer fronts having brass pulls and a sponge decorated top. A colorful basket of fruit sits on top of the check and the scene is framed by a billowing curtain held back by a fine brass curtain pull at the upper right of the canvas.

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

John Gordon, New York, early 1970s
Mr. and Mrs. Alvan Bisnoff, New York, October 1991

EXHIBITED

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York, August 8-October 5, 1975
Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, Williamsburg, Virginia, October 12-December 1, 1975
Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York, December 14, 1975-February 8, 1976
Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan, February 26-April 4, 1976
Illinois State Museum, Springfield, Illinois, April 25-May 30, 1976
St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri, 1977

LITERATURE

Marianne E. Balazs, "Sheldon Peck," Magazine Antiques, August 1975, p. 273-284, fig. 11-12
Paul S. D'Ambrosio and Charlotte M. Emans, Folk Art's Many Faces: Portraits in the New York State Historical Association, 1987, p. 116-122
Jean Lipman and Tom Armstrong, American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, 1980, p.134-138
Whitney Museum of Art Catalogue, 1975

NOTE

Sheldon Peck was born in Cornwall, Vermont in 1797, and like most folk artists, was primarily self-taught, receiving little formal training, instead copying other itinerant artists of the period. In 1837, Peck and his wife, Harriet moved from the town of Jordan in New York State to Chicago and then to Babcock's Grove, Illinois. Perhaps in an effort to compete with the daguerreotype, his work evolved towards greater stylization, distinct facial planes, clear colors, and billowing drapes (as seen in the Portrait of Mrs. Calhoun) and these are all characteristic of Peck's style.

John Calhoun was the founder and editor of the Chicago Democrat, Chicago's first newspaper, and although he sold the newspaper in 1836, it is entirely possible that he remained as editor or in other ways still identified with the publication.

The wonderful detail of these portraits eloquently documents the style and objects of both the period and the region, then truly the edge of the American frontier. The visual quality of the landscape in the portrait of Mr. Calhoun and the interior view in the portrait of Mrs. Calhoun, would stand alone as separate folk paintings.


The life and work of Sheldon Peck was introduced to the public in an article by Marianne P. Balazs in The Magazine Antiques, August 1975, and the same month the article was used as the catalogue essay for a pioneering exhibition of the artist's work presented by the Whitney Museum of American Art that traveled to four museums. Peck soon became the most recent original talent to be added to the roster of master American folk artists who first began to be recognized at the beginning of the 20υth century.

The portraits of Mr. and Mrs. John Calhoun, included in the Whitney Museum exhibition, illustrate the characteristics of Peck's distinctive style. Their ruddy complexions are so pronounced with intense warm tones that their faces seem to project from the paintings. Features are composed of arrangements of shaped areas of flat, slightly modeled colors in unrealistic, shadowless light. To emphasize their faces, clothing becomes silhouettes and recedes into the background - her collar fades away and his coat is hardly distinguished from the wall behind. In both portraits, a triangle of light clothing below their necks creates a pronounced geometric counterpoint to the oval of the faces.

American folk art was first collected by artists who saw abstract elements in the best examples similar to the abstraction they were beginning to respond to in European modernism. Multiple view points in the Peck portraits are an example. The compositions of the companion portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Calhoun contain an abstract development of space that relates the two paintings in an unusual way and adds a special dimension to their content.

There are linear associations in the compositions; the top of the bowl of fruit behind Mrs. Calhoun coincides with the horizon in the distant landscape beyond Mr. Calhoun. The two sitters are placed in identical locations flanking the central area of the paired portraits and are the same distance from the left and right edges of the paintings. The central area between Mr. and Mrs. Calhoun has a contrast of space that emphasizes her confinement in a restricted domestic interior and his relationship to an expansive environment. The attitude of objects they are holding, his newspaper and her book, lead you to enter this central area of the combined paintings. Mrs. Calhoun is just inside the shallow space of her portrait--the two drawers of the furniture beside her are on the picture plane, but she overlaps them and her hand almost rests on the frame--his hand is behind the frame. An element of time enters the picture; she has paused in her reading--the past--and her finger marks the place in her book to continue--the future. She is contemplative in limited, personal surroundings. The dark line between the drawers is parallel and in front of the similar dark line at the bottom of the window. They are related in space by the diagonal edge of the table creating a sense of perspective which leads the eye to the window view of infinity behind Mr. Calhoun who sits in realistic space. Peck, interested in the representation of his subjects, obviously responded to their character and relationships and used his art to interpret the narrative of his insights.

Tom Armstrong
Director Emeritus
Whitney Museum of American Art