Maxim Karolik folk art

Magazine Antiques, April, 2001 by Carol Troyen

Two months after Karolik acquired this Eden, he bought Field's second version of the subject (now at the Shelburne Museum) for four hundred dollars. In 1957, he purchased Field's portrait of Almira Gallond Moore (since reidentified as Louisa Ellen Gallond Cook and also at Shelburne), from a Peter-sham, Massachusetts, schoolteacher who had rescued the painting from the town dump after nearly putting his foot through it. That same year, Karolik added Field's masterpiece Joseph Moore and His Family (Pl. X) to the collection, and subsequently acquired the full-length life-sized portrait of Margaret Gilmore of about 1845.

Karolik found the last three Fields after the second Karolik Collection opened to the public in 1951, and while he was building the third collection--completing the "trilogy," as he called it. Like the second collection, the third was assembled with the active participation of the museum's curators, principally Henry P. Rossiter (1885-1976), curator of prints. Karolik began buying works on paper about 1943. After his wife's death in late April 1948, he threw himself into the project, and once again was deluged with prospects. In August 1948, Rossiter wrote Karolik, "I hope your courage holds up, for again Fate has been kind and the dealers most helpful, producing scores of items, many of which are unquestionably outstanding in merit and importance." [9] Rossiter then detailed more than four hundred works on paper by academic and folk artists for Karolik to consider.

Even fewer of the folk artists in this third collection than in the second have been identified, and, even when names of artists are known, little else has been discovered about them. This is the case with the schoolgirl Mary S. Chapin, who painted the melancholy Solitude (Pl.VI) between about 1815 and 1820, and Mirible Marford (1814-1827), who at the age of eleven painted Dunbarton Castle. Like many folk watercolors, both of these were ultimately derived from prints, but are utterly and charmingly transformed by the artists' imagination.

As with the "primitives" in the paintings collection, most of these works had long been ignored or derided as hopelessly amateurish. As Mark Twain (1835-1910) wrote of sandpaper drawings such as the now celebrated Magic Lake (P1. VII):

Framed in black mouldings on the wall, other works of art, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sailboat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal conspicuous in the corner. [10]

Nor were those who made their living by their art necessarily accorded much respect Wilhelm Schimmel, an itinerant carver based near Carlisle, Pennsylvania, who used to exchange his small carved and painted animals for lodging and strong drink, was eulogized as a man whose "only occupation was carving heads of animals out of soft Pine wood. These he would sell for a few pennies each. He was...a man of very surly disposition." [11] Nonetheless, Schimmel became one of Karolik's favorites. The collector gave the museum a dozen Schimmel carvings, including a majestic eagle and an amusingly ferocious lion (Pl. I).