Reconciliation and The Threshing Machine
Among the World Columbian Exposition’s most magnificent paintings was Russian master Grigoriy Myasoyedov’s monumental Time of Toil—The Reapers, identified at the fair as Harvest-Time. Nearly nine feet wide and covering forty-five square feet of canvas, the expansive painting and gilded wood frame may have been the largest at the exhibition, and appropriately dominated one of the Palace of Fine Arts’ four large halls as a gesture of cultural goodwill from Tsar Nicholas II’s personal collection. One marvels not only at such immense treasures, but at the time, expense, and labor needed for crating and secure global transport. Harvests and other agrarian scenes painted by artists with personal experience in farming like John Linnell and Parisian Albert Gabriel Rigolot (1862-1932), who had instructed Evans and the “Utah Missionaries,” depicted the new order in realistic scenes that were at once natural and humane.
Grigoriy Myasoyedov, Time of Toil—The Reapers (detail, 1887), Wikimedia Commons
Linnell’s Storm at Harvest, which was exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and Rigolot’s The Threshing Machine, painted that same year but not shown in Chicago, both exemplified prospect of an emerging cultural consilience in the aftermath of what agricultural historians term the Second Agricultural Revolution. (The first took place with medieval farmers’ introduction of crop rotations to increase soil fertility and grain yields.) To be sure, the workers in Rigolot’s painting appear too intent on their duties to sing harvest folksongs, which probably could not have been heard above the din of the thresher anyway. But as with the group scenes in the 1870s Harvest Time pictures by William Hahn and William Rogers, they still work together. In Rigolot’s canvas a woman helps to feed a similar stationary thresher, and the team likely eats together, converse throughout the day, and are probably grateful for the mechanical marvel that spares so many weeks of toilsome flailing. The scene is vibrant from the artist’s admirable talent for rendering the soft, hazy effects of summertime heat, and balances a spirit of innovation with the adjacent timbered farmhouse and barn where as many animals are seen as in any Barbizon painting.
Albert Gabriel Rigolot, The Threshing Machine; Loiret (1893), Wikimedia Commons
Similar views are in Albert Kappis’s many German harvest works like Farmyard Threshing Machine (1885) which shows no less than twenty people—men and women feeding the enormous wooden Dreishmaschine while children play among chickens, turkeys, and geese. One can almost hear the whine of pulleys and belts as an elderly man stokes the engine’s fire with a shovelful of coal. The overall wholesomeness of paintings by Linnell, Rigolot, and Kappis reveal a hopeful oeuvre in which agrarian landscapes with agricultural innovations need not represent contradictory values, but complementary ones. Their works also represented an important middle way between the aesthetic tensions of an age that divided critics and commoners into rural and urban, traditional and progressive, mystical and visionary.
Albert Kappis, Farmyard Threshing Machine (1885), Columbia Heritage Collection
World’s Fair Journalism and Sculpture
Popular Iowa journalist and novelist Alice French (1850-1934), who authored many stories under the pen name Octave Thanet, visited the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 for two “Sketches of American Types” Scribner’s Magazine articles, illustrated by Pennsylvanian A. B. Frost 1851-1928), “The Farmer in the North” (March, 1894) and “The Farmer in the South” (April, 1894). Frost was colorblind which may have enhanced his notable use of grayscale for photorealistic art as seen in A New England Type, his tender Scribner’s depiction of a young girl in a harvest field who appears to deliver a lunch pail to an elderly worker.
French’s approach as a local colorist emphasized rural custom and dialect in sentimental prose that described various farm folk she found visiting the fair:
Sunshine seemed to fit her; for she was a comfortable and ample presence in holiday black, brightened by the red rose in her bonnet and the pink on her comely cheeks. She listened to a monotone of complaints of the crowd and the weather and the restaurant fare...; she was sympathetic but she was unflinchingly cheerful. I perceived that here was one of those homely saints who hide their halo under a zest for laughter…. I know she bakes the wedding-cake for the rural brides, and has fifty sensible, homespun remedies for sickness, and comes to watch with the very sick, and helps babies come into the world, and is a sturdy comforter and provider to the rural clergy.
…All the classes and divisions of the American farmer were at the great Fair. There was the prosperous farmer of the New England states, and the equally prosperous farmer of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa; there was the tenant-farmer of the South, who may not prosper, but is always sure of cornmeal, pork, and molasses as long as his planter landlord does not go bankrupt; and the unprosperous farmers farther West, with their mortgaged farms and their discontent. Nor did it take any especial gift of discrimination to pick them out, the one from the other.
A. B. Frost, A New England Type, Octave Thanet, “The Farmer in the North” (Scribner’s Magazine; March, 1894)
Chicago’s Columbian Exposition also showcased important agrarian sculpture including Jean-Alexandre Republican France allegorical statue and the stunning life-size bronze, The Mower (1884 plaster, 1894 bronze) by English sculptor W. Hamo Thornycroft (1850-1925). Member of a distinguished London family of sculptors, Thornycroft became the leading figure in the New Sculpture movement of the 1890s that sought to animate the staid poses of classical statuary through more natural and contemporary representations of the human form. The Mower shows a shirtless young “countryman” clasping a scythe to his right side and holding his left arm akimbo with laced work boots and bib strap. Inspiration for the work came from a countryside excursion he took by boat along the Thames in 1882 when he saw a figure who brought to mind lines from the pastoral poem Thyrsis (1866) by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888):
Too rare, too rare, grow now my visits here!
But once I knew each field, each flower, each stick;
And with the country-folk acquaintance made
By barn in threshing-time, by new-built rick.
Where are the mowers, who, as the tiny swell
Of our boat passing heav’d the river-grass,
Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass?—
They are all gone, and thou art gone as well.
Right: W. Hamo Thornycraft, Agriculture, Institute of Chartered Accountants, London (c. 1893)
Thornycroft’s masterpiece was probably the century’s first life-size statue of an everyday rural laborer—an unprecedented representation in both style and subject for class-conscious Victorian England. In an 1885 lecture to students at the Royal Academy, he explained how sculpture could benefit from new technologies like photography and “scientific exactness,” but that art served a higher purpose: “Science teaches man how to make use of the forces and laws in nature and shows their perfect consistency and harmony. But it is by means of Art that the ever-changing and evanescent forms and effects in nature, which are constantly before man and which astonish and perplex, can alone be arrested & permanently expressed. Art can thus interpret nature to man and teach him to perceive her beauty.”
Thornycraft’s innovative approach and adulatory commentary on his work by British art critic Edmund Gosse secured his reputation as a key figure in the transition of Western sculpture from the Neoclassical style of the 1800s to the twentieth century Modernism of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) and his followers. Inspired by images of the Roman goddess Libertas, France’s stalwart republican figure of Marianne and America’s Columbia emerged in the nineteenth century as important symbols of national culture and aspiration. Both were commonly depicted with crowns of cereal grain and in other ways associated with rural folk and values.
Adolph Weinman, Cereals (1908), Vermont Marble North Pediment, Department of Agriculture Whitten Building, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
W. Clark Noble, Sheaf of Wheat (c. 1900), National Gallery of Art
Among America’s foremost Neoclassical sculptors of the time were Adolph Weinman (1870-1952), a native of Karlsruhe, Germany; Lithuanian-born Victor David Brenner (1871-1924), and W. Clark Noble (1858-1938) of Maine. Weinman had immigrated to the United States in the 1880s and studied at Cooper Union in New York with Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Philip Martiny. Weinman’s lyrical designs brought numerous state and federal art commissions ranging from medallions and the “Mercury dime,” to monumental stone friezes. Among his finest works in Washington, D. C. is Cereals (1908), a massive pediment sculpture crowning the Department of Agriculture Whitten Building’s north entrance. Carved from Vermont marble, Cereals shows two figures surrounded by sheaves of grain and corn husks who hold a title shield and is Weinman’s tribute to the agricultural bounty of his adopted homeland.
Brenner is best known for his design of the “Lincoln penny” that featured a profile of the president based on an iconic Mathew Brady photograph. Released in 1909 to commemorate the centennial of Lincoln’s birth, Brenner’s familiar design also featured a curved wheat stalk flanking each side of the image symbolizing America as a land of plenty. Brenner also created the Neoclassical bronze and granite public sculpture A Song of Nature (1918) that is a contributing property to Pittsburg’s Schenley Farms Historic District. After his ship captain father died at sea, Clark Noble moved with his mother to her father’s farm in Maine where he became fascinated by the beauty of natural forms in livestock and crops. He studied anatomy and art in Boston and London before opening a studio in Newport, Rhode Island, and later in New York where he won many commissions for monumental works. His Sheaf of Wheat (c. 1900) is a masterfully carved modern interpretation of this elegant primitive form.
To view the first post of this 2-part blog series, click here.