"Joseph Pickett", the self-taught
artist and noninheritor of art traditions, whose work once was shown in the Town Hall by the New Group, was born in New Hope in 1848 -- day and month unknown -- and died there on 12 December 1918. He had aspired to recount in paintings the history of his home town. Very few, however, of the pictures survive, and little is known of the painter's personal story. His "Washington Under the Council Tree" hangs now in the Newark Museum; his "Manchester Valley" in the museum of Modern Art. A third canvas belongs to the Whitney Museum. Not a single painting remains in New Hope nor, apparently, any pictorial record of the painter. What had he looked like, I wondered. I would like to know. Quietly, and under a nom de guerre, I advertised for photographs of him. Unlike Tom Knaly's, my advertisement brought no response, and yet, as I later discovered, it had not gone unnoticed. When I went to see "Asa Pickett", grand-nephew of the man of genius, who also lived on Mechanic Street, a few doors below where his granduncle had lived, tended store and painted, and asked if, perchance, he had a picture of "Joseph Pickett", I found he had given thought to the subject.
"I was reading this town paper the other day," Asa Pickett replied, "and I saw another fellow was looking for pictures of "Joe Pickett". Well, I could show you a picture of my grandfather, "John Pickett", and if I were to tell you it was a picture of
"Uncle Joe", how the hell would you know the difference or this fellow that's advertising, either? You just by God wouldn't know if it was "John" or "Joe" or anybody else because you don't know a damn thing about the "Picketts" and there's not many in this whole town who do. And still this fellow advertised and says he'll pay for a picture and he can't even tell if it's what he wants or not. Now what kind of sense is that?"
I was in no position to say and I guess "Asa Pickett" saw that he had me. He gave me a withering look. "You don't know," he said, answering his question, "because you're just like all these other people going around talking about "Joe Pickett" and don't know a goddam thing about him, but there were five brothers, "Joe, Sam, Bill, Jake and John", and they all looked much alike. Uncle "Joe" was, I'd say, about five foot eight; weighed maybe 195. All the "Picketts" were heavy set and long livers, what you'd call well put together. If you want to write a book, or are trying to make money out of "Joe Pickett", then this is as much as you'll get from me. I've had people come out from New York trying to find out about "Uncle Joe"."
I said to "Asa Pickett" that I had no intention of writing a book about his famous relation, but only some words, and that I would do so in any case, for "Joseph Pickett" had painted himself everlastingly into the area. As for making money, I said that in years at my trade I had earned no more than wages. "I am not complaining," I told him, "just stating a fact. If a few paragraphs and pages on "Joseph Pickett" are going to mend that situation, I will indeed be surprised, but not unpleasantly so."
My condition seemed to suit "Asa Pickett". "A few paragraphs -- I don't mind," he said in an amicable tone. "I could have had all the paintings," he went on to say, "because "Uncle Joe" had no children. Now I wish I had them, but how was I to know? There just was no way. "Joe Pickett" never said he was going to be famous, and I don't believe he ever thought a damn thing about it."
I asked the nephew about the paintings. What subjects had interested the uncle? "Of the big paintings I remember the ‘Schoolhouse,'" "Asa Pickett" mused, "and 'Ringing Rocks,' and 'George Washington,' and 'Manchester Valley' -- that's what they used to call it out Mechanic Street. I don't know how many little paintings he did, dozens of them, about the size of a nine-by-twelve light. There was a very nice one of the American flag. But I guess his widow, that was my "Aunt Emmy", burned them. You can't blame her -- they were just lying around and nobody wanted them.
"Three of us grandnephews are alive," "Asa Pickett" continued, "but I knew Uncle the best. I worked with him when he had his store in the building that Bill Ney owns now. He used the whole thing; it was his house and he had a store in the house. You could buy anything from a pin to a pail of paint."
"He was a canalboat builder by trade, a good carpenter, and most of the time he worked at the boat yard where the Legion hall is now, but he was always dickering about something and always trying something new. At one time he lived over on Bridge Street..."
"He must have been about sixty when he started painting. He had to mix his own paint out of what he kept in the store and he sold heavy muslin and that's what he painted on. He didn't make any fuss about it -- never went out to paint anything. He just sat in the house and painted when he felt like it. Some of the people laughed at the pictures; others thought they were nice."
"Asa Pickett" then showed me a picture of "John Pickett", "Joseph's" brother, and "John" looked good to me. It is hard to imagine how "Joe" could have looked any better. "Asa" said, "There are not two men on Mechanic Street now who could tell you if it was "John" or "Joe"." He showed me another photo of "Grandfather John" sitting on the porch of his house, trolley tracks, long since removed, going by the door, and in place of the concrete bridge in front of the Playhouse a wooden canal bridge -- in fact a whole albumful of family pictures, and "Joe", so he said, in none of them. "I was born across the street in Brick Hall, lived around this corner all my life. And," the aging nephew said, closing the album, "some people think they know about New Hope."
A man can be well informed about New Hope yet know but little of "Joseph Pickett", and be able to document even less. The Doylestown 'Daily Intelligencer', 20 December 1918, under the heading "Necrology," described "Pickett" not as a painter, of course, but "for a considerable time a merchant on Bridge Street." It also informed its uncounted readers that though the funeral was held in New Hope "interment was made at Hulmeville Cemetery."
Hulmeville, on the east bank of the Neshaminy Creek, lies in Middletown Township, eighteen or twenty miles southwest of New Hope and deep in the southwest corner of lower Bucks. Lower is different from central Bucks; it looks more like southern New Jersey, or the low coastal plain of Maryland's eastern shore. In colonial times and for many years after, Hulmeville was a center of the woolen and weaving industry. Today, however, only an ancient string and rope factory remains to tell of its manufacturing past, and tie up loose ends of history. And though the stacks of the Fairless Works, United States Steel, make their skyward thrust but ten miles away, the population of Hulmeville is scarcely one thousand persons. The first wave of progress passed over it early. For the time being Hulmeville appears to be out of the running. No research department, no new products division.
On a drizzling, cool and low-pressure day when damp leaves were falling, I seized the freedom of the steering wheel and drove down the Durham Road, down beyond U.S. Route 1, and into the borough of Hulmeville. There I learned from the man in the Unity Frankford store that the cemetery lay on the other side of the creek, on the Neshaminy's steeply rising west bank. So, crossing by the five-Roman-arch concrete bridge, I rode over, and on up the hill and into the cemetery. Declining toward the Neshaminy, it appeared not at all an unpleasant place to lie down in. The graves did not look uncomfortable, especially those uncrowded by excess stone.
Near the graveyard entrance stood an old-fashioned, clapboarded toolhouse large enough for a plantation office. As I approached its open door, the combination gatekeeper, gravedigger and superintendent of grounds, one Arthur Owen -- for I asked him his name -- came out. Of medium height, brown-eyed as the earth, brown eathery-faced, lean and becapped, he looked for all the world like a Scottish crofter met in a Scottish and afternoon mist.
I asked Mr. Owen where I might find "Joseph Pickett". "Pickett", he said in a high, whinnying voice. He shook his head. "Do you have a plan or map of the cemetery?" I asked. "No," he replied in the same equine tone, and again shook his head. But he did look thoughtful, and invited me to come into the toolhouse and out of the rain. Inside the toolhouse smelled fine, and felt warm and dry. A potbelly stove stood in the center of the single large room and a coal fine burned in the stove, just a small banked fire with the stove door open, and the toolhouse door open too, for the day was not cold but only damp. The first fire of autumn for me, it felt good. I warmed my hands, for cemetery trotting is, after all, cold work. On top of the stove, Mr. Owen had water heating but I cannot say whether for shaving or making tea. I gave him a cigar, a rum-cured crook, which he lighted at once and with amazing rapidity shortened by two or three inches. It did not seem to help. "Pickett, Pickett" he muttered. He said he could not recall seeing the name. So out and into the drizzle again. I walked up and down several marble - and granite - bound lanes, looking to right and left. This was no little boneyard; the search began to stretch away, long and wet. I returned to the warmth of the toolhouse and gave Mr. Owen another cigar. He lighted it promptly and bellowed at it. "Pickett"," he repeated, "Pickett", No."
I went out again, came back again, and presented a third cigar. "Write that name down," Mr. Owen said and handed me paper and pencil. I took them, and as I printed each letter I spoke it. Settling the third cigar in his face, Mr. Owen listened.
His expression changed; I think he smiled just a little. "Come with me," he said. We went out together, walked down the easy slope to a point where the ground breaks steeply above the creek. There on the aisle, so to speak, for the headstone faces the southern and wooded boundary, stood the rather imposing and businesslike stone, and engraved across the top of the hefty granite the single word, "PICKETT". Altogether a very suitable stone for the "merchant," as the papers had described him, and for the artist who had painted simply the seven letters of "Pickett" on the front of his general store. Beneath that foursquare and significant word, the stonecutter carved the given name, "Joseph", and dates, 1848-1918; and below that, "Emily M.", and her dates, 1848-1929. And that is all. At the foot of the stone a little bronze marker states, Perpetual Care. "Perpetual is a lot of care, Mr. Owen," I said. "It is that," he replied. For a fraction of all that endless time we stood in the rain, just looking, and one of us feeling his feet getting wet. Then, handing over the last cigars in the five-pack, I bid Arthur Owen good afternoon.
"Joseph Pickett" had been forty-five or so when he married "Emily M". The fact that she had been the same age may account for the lack of children. "Emily" had come from the lower part of the county. She probably met her future husband when, in the 1890's, he conducted a shooting gallery at Neshaminy Falls Grove, then a well-known amusement park in an idyllic setting on the creek not many miles above Hulmeville. In his earlier years, "Joseph Pickett" had often held concessions at fairs and parks but after his marriage he led a more stay-at-home life. However, as both the Mechanic Street and the later Bridge Street stores stood beside the canal, on the towpath side, he still had some traffic with the outside world. When quiet times came, as they inevitable did, he went to a room at the back and painted. "Jos. Pickett", Art., he signed himself on the canvas.
A native son, Bramwell Linn, told me that he remembered "Joe Pickett" painting but recalled more clearly stealing the store-keeper's pies. As a small boy Bramwell Linn liked to visit the Bridge Street store where the pies were displayed, buy one and filch one.
A grandniece, "Mrs. Carrie Pickett Ely", told me she could have succeeded to all the paintings. After her granduncle died, her grandaunt asked her to store them. But alas, they had not seemed worth storing. " "Aunt Emmy", as we always called her, was stout," "Mrs. Ely" reminisced. "So was he. She was a very likable woman, and he was a nice pleasant man."
Not until 1925, seven years after his death, did a painterly taste encounter Joe Pickett's paintings. In that year Lloyd Ney, pronounced 'nigh', a young upstate painter who had studied in Paris, moved into New Hope. Soon thereafter, in the then Worthington Brothers garage and automobile showroom on Main Street, Bill, as Lloyd has been called many years, saw a couple of canvases standing against a wall. The work of an obviously untutored and, outside of New Hope, certainly unknown hand, one was titled "Washington Under the Council Tree," and other, "Coryell's Ferry 1776." Bill Ney liked them. At the Logan Inn a day or two later, chatting with the then proprietor, old Pop Johnson, Bill said he wanted to buy them and was willing to pay $50. Pop Johnson replied that Bill must be crazy. Seven years earlier, at the two-day auction of the former storekeeper's stock and effects, the paintings
had gone for one dollar each, or less -- and most of them to the widow. However, if Bill really wanted the pictures, he better let Pop Johnson handle it.
Pop Johnson bought them for $7.50 and sold them to Bill for $15. Bill Ney, now the owner of two large "Picketts", took them to his studio where, admired, they hung; but not for long. A few months later, being in need of frames, Bill surrendered the pair to R. Moore Price, a local dealer in paintings and frames for $50 worth of the latter.
Moore Price, the new possessor of the Picketts, consulted his brother, Fred, in those days the owner of the Ferargil Gallery in New York. Fred Price allowed, according to Moore, that Moore might get a couple of hundred apiece for the work of the New Hope primitive but that if he, Fred, were to show them on Fifty-seventh Street, his customers would mob him.
Time passed. Moore did not sell until 1931. Some thirty years later he told me that as nearly as he could recollect he got $500 for one, and $700 for the other. "We hated to part with them," he said, speaking for his wife as well as himself. "There was something so damn human about them."
Nowadays a Pickett is not often seen in New Hope. So far as I know the last time was when the remodeled Parry Barn was opened as a cultural center in June, 1960. For that occasion the Whitney Museum loaned the New Hope Historical Society its "Coryell's Ferry 1776." Throughout the exhibition period the painting was guarded by the uniformed local constabulary, and of course the Society paid the insurance premium. Valuation: $30,000. It is hard now to buy or steal the ex-storekeeper's wares. About all you can do is borrow.
Two nights of frost and Indian Summer and Gilding and Bronzing Leaves. Along the towpath, dogwood is purple, sumac has changed into scarlet. A maple showing both red and green foliage looks benevolent and relaxed. See, by the roadside, the fuzzy and coral grasses, tender-blushing and Renoir pink. In this blue smokey time of year, Indians break up camp. They turn toward cold-weather hunting grounds even while tourists are getting their second wind.
October 9, fair and mild. At the post-office matins Mrs. Davis announces she likes it, the day this is. "This is Fire Prevention Week," she informs me. "I have a feeling the Reds are going to win today," says Robert Johnson, looking deep as the freezer he sits beside. "Robert," I say, "on a day like this, how can you miss ?" Robert replies, "How about that ?" and beams. Corn leaves have turned. Cornfields are looking untenanted now, like birds' nests after the birds have departed. On the last old-style farms the sheaves stand in shocks.
***** END OF CHAPTER *****
