Thomas Cole, Stephen Crane and the ghost of the Cardiff Giant, that Mark Twain conjured up in his shabby NYC digs, are only a few of the visionaries and malcontents who have trudged through these hills over the years. Many are world renown. Many more are obscure. Two of my favorite lesser knowns are Frederick Albert Cook and Ethelbert Baldwin Crawford—both Sullivan County residents—men who changed the world and were not appreciated or rewarded for their efforts.
I stumbled across both of these men, who very well may have known each other, long before I started digging into Catskill history. Ethelbert B. Crawford was the first. I’d just returned from lecturing in Cuba and not having a computer (the only way to communicate cheaply with the island) I went in the Monticello library bearing Crawford’s name, in order to use their computer located in the basement. On my way down the stairs I looked above the stacks, noticing the entire room was festooned with small portraits and landscapes, done with a unique hand. This was not your typical Sunday painter’s show. I asked the girl at the desk about the work and she shrugged her shoulders. “They were donated.” she said and went back to her magazine.
It would take years before the paintings caught my eye again. This time I dug deeper. The head librarian, Alan Barrish, was happy to meet somebody who gave a shit about the art he’d been looking at for the past twenty years. We hit it off and after a couple more years of research and negotiations I bought ten Ethelbert Crawford paintings, showing them along with a large selection of the library’s collection at MO David North.
Ethelbert Crawford was a student of Robert Henri, a leader in the Ashcan School of gritty, painterly realism in the late 19th and early decades of the twentieth century. Crawford showed in the seminal Exhibition of Independent Artists, organized by Henri, John Sloan and Walter Kuhn in 1910 in New York City. The Ashcan School were, for the most part, the urban version of the antipastoralists. They portrayed visually the realism that Crane was reflecting in print. Crawford was the country outlier. But by the 1913 Armory Show they were all old news, eclipsed by European modernist giants like Duchamp, Picasso and Picabia. Work by American painters like Robert Henri and what became known as The Eight (the additional Evertt Shinn, John Sloane, Arthur B. Davies, Ernest Lawson, Maurice Prendergast, George Luks, and William Glackens) quickly fell out of fashion. Today their work survives and all are highly collectible, constantly being re-discovered. Ethelbert B. Crawford, though talented, did not stand out. He was lost to obscurity. He has no market. I don’t care. None of my collection is for sale.
Those “donated” paintings, tucked in every available square foot of the old library’s walls, were given to the library by Ethelbert Crawford’s doting mother Estelle. She had tried to give them to the Met and was politely declined. Then she put up her own money to build Monticello’s first library under the condition that her son’s paintings “always be on the display.” I read the will and have a copy. The wording is important. It doesn’t say “all” the paintings should be displayed, only that they “always” adorn the walls. After her only surviving child took a deer rifle and put a hole in his heart she wanted to do something to honor his memory.
A late in life love affair gone horribly wrong, Ethelbert (who lived with mom) had been depressed and despondent for some time. The local doctor was called. Bert asked the doc to take a fountain pen and draw on his chest the exact location of his heart. The doctor complied, Bert excused himself, grabbed the rifle and killed himself.
The paintings spoke to me—even without the tragic story—sending me on a mission to purchase as many as the library was willing to part with. Upon first inquiry that was exactly zero. So I made my case by letter and waited for a reply. There was no reply. I forgot about it. A year went by and one day I got a call from Alan the librarian. He said the library committee had met, considered my offer and were willing to sell ten out of the 150 or so paintings in the collection. I could have my pick. I went straight for the portraits.
This was only the beginning of my Crawford obsession and collection. I located a Crawford relative over in Pennsylvania who had an amazing collection, but was unwilling to part with even one. I understood. I looked online. Nothing. Samm found one and bought it for my birthday. When I did the show at MO David North in 2012 I got a little press and another local art collector called me. He had ten paintings that he was willing to part with. He had picked them up at an estate sale of the Cook family home in Hortonville. Cook? Where did I know that name from?……to be continued.
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