Joseph Pickett

SOME YEARS after his death a village storekeeper named Joseph Pickett won sudden acclaim as an artist when Holger Cahill included two of his paintings, those later acquired by the Newark and Whitney Museums, in the exhibition American Primitives at the Newark Museum in 1930. Two years later Pickett's masterpiece, Manchester Valley, was purchased by Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, Jr. and shown with her collection of American folk art at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Along with Edward Hicks, whose work was introduced in the same exhibitions, Pickett was drawn for the first time into the mainstream of American art.

Pickett had died in 1918 in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where he was born in 1848 and lived his life through. Old residents of the village, questioned by Holger Cahill and later by William Chapman, supplied the little that is known of Pickett, his personality and his work as a painter. No remark he may have made about his painting is remembered, nor is any letter or photograph of Pickett known to exist.

Pickett's father had a boatyard in New Hope, which is on the Delaware River and the Lehigh Canal. He and his sons were canal-boat builders but Joseph left the boatyard early. He was of a restless, lively and inventive turn of mind, a man who could build a house or a sailboat, make a chair or a pair of shoes, devise new kinds of tools, whittle toys, and inally paint a picture. His contemporaries described him as always getting into something new and handy at anything he tried. He kept a general store where he had a pool table and a shooting gallery. In the summers he used to travel about to country fairs and picnic grounds with his shooting gallery, for which he carved the targets and painted landscape backgrounds.

Pickett turned to serious painting late in life, probably at about sixty-five. He painted in the back room of the grocery store he kept at that time. He worked for a very long time on each picture, completing three large canvases which illustrate incidents in the history of his native town. He also painted a tree on the outside wall of his store, part of which was visible until the late 1930s when the building was renovated.

Pickett is said to have exhibited his paintings in his store window, but his only attempt to enter a formal exhibition was in 1918 when William Lathrop, a resident of the artist colony at New Hope, persuaded him to submit a picture to the jury at the Pennsylvania Academy's annual show in Philadelphia. The painting, probably Manchester Valley, was rejected but is said to have received the votes of Lathrop, Robert Henri and Robert Spencer.

After Pickett's death his belongings were sold at auction, but the paintings brought only a dollar each and his widow bought them in. She gave Manchester Valley to the New Hope schoolhouse, the building with a flag which appears in the painting. In 1925 the painter Lloyd Ney, returning from Paris, saw Washington under the Council Tree and Coryell's Ferry hanging in Worthington Brothers garage in New Hope and bought them for fifteen dollars. Later he traded the paintings to R. Moore Price of New Hope for frames. Shortly before the Newark Museum exhibition, Pickett's work is said to have had its first public showing at the New Hope Town Hall in an avant-garde show called "The New Group" organized about 1930 by C. F. Ramsey and Adolphe Blondheim.

It is surprising that a skilled artisan like Pickett, a man of inquiring mind always ready to experiment, did not start painting earlier in life. To the fortunate fact that he finally did paint we owe three of the most remarkable landscapes ever produced in America. Pickett had a freely arbitrary way of handling space and perspective and did not hesitate to invent his own methods of applying paint to suit the needs of the picture as he felt them. He had the clear and intense vision, unerring control of his medium, firm structure and sober harmony of color that characterize the work of the rare few among naive painters.

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