1/28/2024 0 Comments Clementine hunterShe told Mignon that she thought she could do a painting if she set her mind to it, and he gave her a discarded window shade to use as a canvas. So what happened in 1939, when she found some tubes of paint that an artist visitor had left behind, wasn ’t a total surprise. But the one who noticed Hunter ’s talent was an itinerant native of New York State named Frank Mineah, who masqueraded as a French trader and art critic named Fran çois Mignon and who had moved in at Melrose with the idea of becoming a curator of the plantation ’s historical collections.įor many years, Hunter had made clothes and quilts, and she was an adept basketmaker. Various artists and writers, including William Faulkner and John Steinbeck, passed through Melrose as visitors. Religion: Catholic,Ĭareer: Field hand, 1900s-1920s Melrose Plantation, domestic servant, late 1920s painter, 1939-80s.Īwards: Julius Rosenwald fellowship, 1944,Īrchitecture, and Hunter would later paint murals on their walls. January 1887 on Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, LA died on Janumarried Emanuel Hunter, 1924 children: two by Charlie Dupree, five by Hunter. Henry worked to preserve several old structures on the grounds that showed the influence of African At a Glance …īorn Clemence Reuben Hunter ca. Melrose was an unusual plantation in that its mistress, Cammie Henry, had a strong interest in history and the arts. In the late 1920s, Hunter moved from the fields into the plantation house and began working as a maid. She outlived most of her children, none of whom ever owned any of her paintings -she sold or gave them all away, never saving any for herself either. She had seven children, two by an eccentric mechanic named Charlie Dupree with whom she lived early in the twentieth century and five more after marrying Emanuel Hunter in 1924. Hunter continued to work as a cotton picker, a vocation that until the end of her life she maintained that she loved even more than painting. The life she lived there at first was similar in many respects to what her mother ’s parents experienced under slavery. When Hunter was a teenager, her family moved to the Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches. From age eight she worked in fields picking cotton, hoeing corn, and cutting sugar cane. She remained illiterate for the rest of her life. Raised in the Catholic church, Hunter attended a Catholic elementary school for three years but dropped out before she learned to read. A mixed-race (Native American, African, French, and Irish) Louisiana Creole, she was known by the French form of her name, Clemence, for much of her youth. The exact date of her birth is not known, but Hunter was most likely born in January of 1887. The works that Hunter had once sold to friends for 25 cents apiece now commanded prices of up to $50,000.Ĭlementine Reuben Hunter was born on the Hidden Hill plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana. In later years, Hunter ’s works became favorites of white art collectors, a trend that only accelerated after Hunter ’s death in 1988. “Her work is a colorful stroke of life, ” Louisiana State Museum director Carolyn Harrington told the Baton Rouge Advocate. Hunter lived most of her life on a plantation in Louisiana ’s Cane River region, and her paintings depicted the hard work, the religion, and the social and recreational lives of the people around her. Her auction record, however, currently stands at $70,150 for The Annunciation and the Adoration of the Wise Men, featuring black farm workers - the price paid in 2018 by the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.A one-of-a-kind artist who documented and interpreted a vanished world of Southern plantation life, Clementine Hunter was over 50 years old when she began to paint. In January 2020 Christie’s sold Hunter’s 1981 painting Melrose Complex #2, below, for $21,250 - more than four times its low estimate. As she received more recognition, her signature became more stylised.’ ‘As she started to make a little money, she applied paint more generously and used more vibrant colours. ‘You can physically trace her evolution through her works,’ Zimmerman says. Her masterpiece, a nine-panel domestic cycle on the walls of the Melrose Plantation’s African House - a kind of Sistine Chapel of folk art - can be seen on Google Street View. Hunter produced some 5,000 works during the second half of her life, working at night beside a kerosene lamp in her four-roomed, tin-roofed tenant cabin, which is now listed on America’s register of Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios.
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