Maxim Karolik folk art

Magazine Antiques, April, 2001 by Carol Troyen

Karolik had great admiration for these works. He saw them as the product of "men with exceptional talent" whose lack of academic training may have limited their "ability to describe, but it certainly did not hinder their ability to express...I should not be surprised to hear that the paintings of the little-known and the unknown artists had 'stolen the show'," he wrote at the debut of the second Karolik Collection. [7]

Karolik had a number of favorites among the show stealers, prime among them being William Matthew Prior. Did he respond to the lustrous color, supple outlines, and decorative touches that animate Prior's portraits? Karolik did not say, but he eventually owned at least eight paintings now assigned to Prior and three works now ascribed to his brother-in-law Sturtevant J. Hamblen (w. 1837-1856) or other members of Prior's "Painting Garret." The gems of this group are several portraits of black Americans, reflecting in their creation Prior's abolitionist views, which led him to paint these sitters with seriousness and respect while contemporaries tended to caricature. W Lawson and Nancy Lawson (1843; both now in the Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, Vermont), which Karolik bought in 1954, are among Prior's most richly painted works. And Three Sisters of the Copeland Family (Pl. IV), in which fashionably dressed children hold a book, some cherries, and a bouquet of flowers, advertises the Chelsea, Massachusetts, famil y's middle-class prosperity.

Karolik collected Erastus Salisbury Field's work with equal enthusiasm. He bought his first Field, The Garden of Eden (Pl. V), from the artist's grandnephew in 1948. That painting, executed about 1860, was one of the first of many ambitious and deeply felt religious subjects the painter produced after his wife's death. Field's Eden is well populated and well organized: the pyramid-shaped mountains recede into the mist in orderly rows, the landscape combines New England fruit trees with tropical palms, and, like a toy Noah's ark, animals parade in pairs, camels, giraffes, and elephants mingling amicably with their domestic brethren. Eve plucks the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge at the center of the picture, while the snake, its insidious task done, slithers off to the left.

For many years, however, there had been no trace of Eve or the snake, which apparently had been painted out at some point (see Fig. 2). After Karolik acquired the painting, the museum's conservators removed the censorious overpaint, revealing once more the trouble at the heart of paradise. Informed of the reappearance of Eve and her tempter, the painting's previous owner wrote Karolik:

I regret the delay in making acknowledgement of receipt of the "Garden of Eden" photo showing Eve in all her majesty picking apples and the spotted serpent racing toward Adam. It was all a great surprise to me. I never had heard Eve's absence mentioned in the family....Although my maternal grandparents--Stillman and Aurilla Field, brought up a family of five I suspect that their daughter Miss Cynthia, whom I knew as a spinster schoolteacher, probably suggested the obliteration of Eve. [8]