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Dem Was Good Ole Times
Artist:
Thomas Hovenden
(American, 1840-1895)
Date: 1882
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions:
Overall: 16 1/8 x 12 1/8 in. (41 x 30.8 cm)
Overall, Frame: 29 1/8 x 25 1/4 x 5 in. (74 x 64.1 x 12.7 cm)
Classification: American art
Credit Line: Museum purchase with Funds Provided by The Chrysler Museum Landmark Communication Art Trust; An Anonymous Donor; Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Waitzer; Mr. and Mrs. Richard F. Barry III; and The Museum's Accession Fund.
Object number: 92.49.1
Terms
- Man
- African-American Theme
- Portrait
- Music
- Banjo
- Blue
- White
- Green
- Brown
- Black
- Gray
- Creme
- Genre
- Plymouth Meeting, PA
Not on view
DescriptionThis oil on canvas painting is a vertical figure piece which depicts an elderly African-American man, named Samuel Jones; he is seated on a bench looking directly at the viewer. Wearing a suit of many patches, he holds a clay pipe in his left hand, while in the right foreground his five-string banjo rests on a late 18th-century faux-bamboo Windsor chair, which was an integral part of Hovenden's studio furniture.
Exhibition History"Interstate Industrial Exhibition," Chicago, Ill., Fall 1882.
"26th Exhibition," Boston Art Club, Mass., 1882. (Exh. cat. no. 77)
Baltimore, 1883.
"Thomas Hovenden: Intimate Insights," The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Va., January 15 - March 13, 1994; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Tex., May 7 - August 14, 1994.
"Thomas Hovenden [1840-1895]: American Painter of Hearth and Homeland," Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pa., September 14 - December 1, 1995.
"Treasures for the Community: The Chrysler Collects, 1989-1996," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., October 25, 1996 - February 16, 1997.
"The Birth of the Banjo," Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, N.Y., November 9, 2003 - February 1, 2004.
"Picturing the Banjo," Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., December 10, 2005 - March 5, 2006; Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, PA, March 30 - June 25, 2006; Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA, July 26 - October 21, 2006.
"Reopening of the Joan P. Brock Galleries," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., Opening in March of 2008.
"American Treasures at the Willoughby-Baylor House," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, January 2 - December 1, 2013.
"26th Exhibition," Boston Art Club, Mass., 1882. (Exh. cat. no. 77)
Baltimore, 1883.
"Thomas Hovenden: Intimate Insights," The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Va., January 15 - March 13, 1994; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Tex., May 7 - August 14, 1994.
"Thomas Hovenden [1840-1895]: American Painter of Hearth and Homeland," Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pa., September 14 - December 1, 1995.
"Treasures for the Community: The Chrysler Collects, 1989-1996," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., October 25, 1996 - February 16, 1997.
"The Birth of the Banjo," Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, N.Y., November 9, 2003 - February 1, 2004.
"Picturing the Banjo," Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., December 10, 2005 - March 5, 2006; Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, PA, March 30 - June 25, 2006; Boston Athenaeum, Boston, MA, July 26 - October 21, 2006.
"Reopening of the Joan P. Brock Galleries," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Va., Opening in March of 2008.
"American Treasures at the Willoughby-Baylor House," Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA, January 2 - December 1, 2013.
Label textThomas Hovenden
American, 1840–1895
Dem Was Good Ole Times, 1882
Oil on canvas
This elderly black man has lived through emancipation and notable gains in civil rights. Thomas Hovenden’s Dem Was Good Ole Times suggests that his subject feels nostalgia for the past despite the painful memories of slavery. Hovenden’s neighbor Samuel Jones served as his model for this sympathetic image of mirth and music. The white painter Hovenden frequently used art to promote equality, and his message remained important in the 1880s as the federal government began to endorse racial segregation and new forms of discrimination.
Museum purchase with funds provided by the Chrysler Museum Landmark Communications Art Trust, an anonymous donor, Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Waitzer, Mr. and Mrs. Richard F. Barry III., and the Museum’s accession fund 92.49.1
American, 1840–1895
Dem Was Good Ole Times, 1882
Oil on canvas
This elderly black man has lived through emancipation and notable gains in civil rights. Thomas Hovenden’s Dem Was Good Ole Times suggests that his subject feels nostalgia for the past despite the painful memories of slavery. Hovenden’s neighbor Samuel Jones served as his model for this sympathetic image of mirth and music. The white painter Hovenden frequently used art to promote equality, and his message remained important in the 1880s as the federal government began to endorse racial segregation and new forms of discrimination.
Museum purchase with funds provided by the Chrysler Museum Landmark Communications Art Trust, an anonymous donor, Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Waitzer, Mr. and Mrs. Richard F. Barry III., and the Museum’s accession fund 92.49.1
Published References
Samuel Isham, _History of American Painting_ (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1905), 501-502.
_Interstate Industrial Exhibition_ (Chicago, 1882), 87.
Baltimore _Sun_ (May 16, 1883).
Eleanor H. Gustafson, "Museum Accessions," _The Magazine Antiques_ 144, No. 5 (November 1993): 612.
"La Chronique des Arts," _Gazette des Beaux-Arts_, no. 1502 (March 1994): 64, no. 288.
Teresa Annas, "Art and music merge for Chrysler Exhibit," Norfolk, Va., _The Virginian-Pilot and Ledger Star_ (January 27, 1994): B5.
H. Nichols b. Clark, "Thomas Hovenden, _Dem Was Good Ole Times_," _American Art Review_ 5 (Winter 1994), 98.
Anne Gregory Terhune, Sylvia Yount, and Naurice Frank Woods, Jr., _Thomas Hovenden [1840-1895]: American Painter of Hearth and Homeland_, exh. cat., Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, Pa., 1995, 69, 71, 87, no. 49. ISBN: 1888008008
Robert Shaw, Peter Szego, and George Wunderlich, _The Birth of the Banjo_, exh. cat., Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, N.Y., 2003, 51, 53. ISBN: 0915171643
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 110-111, no. 67. ISBN: 0-940744-71-6
Leo G. Mazow, _Picturing the Banjo_, exh. cat., Palmer Museum of Art, University Park, Pa., 2005, 62, 87-89, fig. 78. ISBN: 0-271-02710-X
Anne Gregory Terhune with Patricia Smith Scanlan, forward by Elizabeth Johns, _Thomas Hovenden: His Life and Art_, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006): 108-111. ISBN: 0-8122-3920-2
Provenance
Private Collection, Philadelphia, Pa., in 1883; Private Collection, Paris, France, until 1992.
Catalogue EntryThomas Hovenden
Dunmanway, Ireland 1840-1895 near Trenton, N.J.
Dem Was Good Ole Times, 1882
Oil on canvas, 16 1/8 × 12 1/8 in. (41 × 30.8 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: THovenden
1882
Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Chrysler Museum Landmark Communications Art Trust; an anonymous donor; Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Waitzer; Mr. and Mrs. Richard F. Barry III; and the Museum's accession fund, 92.49.1
References: H. Nichols B. Clark, "Thomas Hovenden, Dem Was Good Ole Times," American Art Review 5 (Winter 1994), p. 98; Anne Gregory Terhune, Sylvia Yount, and Naurice Frank Woods, Jr., Thomas Hovenden: American Painter of Hearth and Homeland, exhib. cat., Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, 1995, pp. 69, 71, 87, no. 49.
Thomas Hovenden's best-known pictures, such as Breaking Home Ties (1893, Philadelphia Museum of Art), are sentimental genre paintings with American themes, but the artist established his reputation painting French peasants and scenes from historical romances. Born in Ireland, Hovenden immigrated to New York in 1863 and studied at the National Academy of Design. With the support of wealthy patrons, he spent six years in France, first working in the Paris studio of Alexandre Cabanel and later traveling periodically to Pont-Aven in Brittany to join a colony of American artists that included Daniel Ridgway Knight (see object 71.2118).
After returning to the United States in 1889, he married Helen Corson, one of the Pont-Aven artists. Corson's father had been an ardent abolitionist decades earlier; the couple settled in her family home in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, which had been a way station for the abolitionists' Underground Railroad. There, Hovenden turned to American subjects for the first time. His most ambitious projects were large historical genre pieces set in and around the Civil War, including a commission for The Last Moments of John Brown (1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which showed the radical abolitionist just before his execution, kissing a small black child.
In the 1880s, Hovenden painted about a dozen small "cabinet" pictures with African-American subjects; several included a Plymouth Meeting neighbor, Samuel Jones, the model for Dem Was Good Ole Times as well as Dat Possum Smell Pow'ful Good, Ise so Happy, Sunday Morning, and Chloe and Sam. The virtuous, elderly black man, cheerfully enduring hardship and poverty, had long been a stereotype in novels and Stephen Foster's songs, and a new figure, Uncle Remus, had just appeared in the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, speaking the same black dialect Hovenden used for some of his titles.
Samuel Jones's face is not a caricature, however, but a thoroughly studied portrait. Over a period of several years, beginning in late 1880 or early 1881 and continuing after Jones's death in 1882, Hovenden reproduced his features many times, in pencil sketches, oil paintings, and etchings. Some historians have argued that Hovenden, along with his Philadelphia colleague Thomas Eakins, approached black sitters with unusual sympathy and pictured them in a dignified manner at odds with the current of their time. From this perspective, the banjo on the chair beside Jones can be seen as a reference to an authentic African-American culture, rather than a cliché borrowed from the minstrel show.
Hovenden showed Dem Was Good Ole Times in Baltimore in 1883, along with Death of Elaine (1882, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania), the last of his European projects. The large painting of the Arthurian legend was given "the place of honor" in the exhibition, but a reviewer was enthusiastic about the smaller picture as well:
In nearly all exhibitions there is one small canvas which is the acknowledged jewel, the pearl beyond price, and Mr. Hovenden's figure of the poor old African, in patched and tattered raiment, like unto Joseph's coat, is unquestionably that precious ornament in these galleries. The lovely spirit of the humble old man, which the painter makes to shine in his dusky, wrinkled face, is a bright example of the highest achievement art can attain, namely, the expression of noble sentiment in human portraiture.
In 1886 Hovenden succeeded his friend Eakins as instructor of painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Among his students was Henry O. Tanner, an African-American artist who chose a subject similar to Hovenden's for his painting The Banjo Lesson (1893, Hampton University Art Gallery, Virginia).
MNH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 110-111, no. 67.
Dunmanway, Ireland 1840-1895 near Trenton, N.J.
Dem Was Good Ole Times, 1882
Oil on canvas, 16 1/8 × 12 1/8 in. (41 × 30.8 cm)
Signed and dated lower right: THovenden
1882
Museum Purchase with funds provided by the Chrysler Museum Landmark Communications Art Trust; an anonymous donor; Mr. and Mrs. Richard M. Waitzer; Mr. and Mrs. Richard F. Barry III; and the Museum's accession fund, 92.49.1
References: H. Nichols B. Clark, "Thomas Hovenden, Dem Was Good Ole Times," American Art Review 5 (Winter 1994), p. 98; Anne Gregory Terhune, Sylvia Yount, and Naurice Frank Woods, Jr., Thomas Hovenden: American Painter of Hearth and Homeland, exhib. cat., Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, 1995, pp. 69, 71, 87, no. 49.
Thomas Hovenden's best-known pictures, such as Breaking Home Ties (1893, Philadelphia Museum of Art), are sentimental genre paintings with American themes, but the artist established his reputation painting French peasants and scenes from historical romances. Born in Ireland, Hovenden immigrated to New York in 1863 and studied at the National Academy of Design. With the support of wealthy patrons, he spent six years in France, first working in the Paris studio of Alexandre Cabanel and later traveling periodically to Pont-Aven in Brittany to join a colony of American artists that included Daniel Ridgway Knight (see object 71.2118).
After returning to the United States in 1889, he married Helen Corson, one of the Pont-Aven artists. Corson's father had been an ardent abolitionist decades earlier; the couple settled in her family home in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, which had been a way station for the abolitionists' Underground Railroad. There, Hovenden turned to American subjects for the first time. His most ambitious projects were large historical genre pieces set in and around the Civil War, including a commission for The Last Moments of John Brown (1884, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which showed the radical abolitionist just before his execution, kissing a small black child.
In the 1880s, Hovenden painted about a dozen small "cabinet" pictures with African-American subjects; several included a Plymouth Meeting neighbor, Samuel Jones, the model for Dem Was Good Ole Times as well as Dat Possum Smell Pow'ful Good, Ise so Happy, Sunday Morning, and Chloe and Sam. The virtuous, elderly black man, cheerfully enduring hardship and poverty, had long been a stereotype in novels and Stephen Foster's songs, and a new figure, Uncle Remus, had just appeared in the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, speaking the same black dialect Hovenden used for some of his titles.
Samuel Jones's face is not a caricature, however, but a thoroughly studied portrait. Over a period of several years, beginning in late 1880 or early 1881 and continuing after Jones's death in 1882, Hovenden reproduced his features many times, in pencil sketches, oil paintings, and etchings. Some historians have argued that Hovenden, along with his Philadelphia colleague Thomas Eakins, approached black sitters with unusual sympathy and pictured them in a dignified manner at odds with the current of their time. From this perspective, the banjo on the chair beside Jones can be seen as a reference to an authentic African-American culture, rather than a cliché borrowed from the minstrel show.
Hovenden showed Dem Was Good Ole Times in Baltimore in 1883, along with Death of Elaine (1882, Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania), the last of his European projects. The large painting of the Arthurian legend was given "the place of honor" in the exhibition, but a reviewer was enthusiastic about the smaller picture as well:
In nearly all exhibitions there is one small canvas which is the acknowledged jewel, the pearl beyond price, and Mr. Hovenden's figure of the poor old African, in patched and tattered raiment, like unto Joseph's coat, is unquestionably that precious ornament in these galleries. The lovely spirit of the humble old man, which the painter makes to shine in his dusky, wrinkled face, is a bright example of the highest achievement art can attain, namely, the expression of noble sentiment in human portraiture.
In 1886 Hovenden succeeded his friend Eakins as instructor of painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Among his students was Henry O. Tanner, an African-American artist who chose a subject similar to Hovenden's for his painting The Banjo Lesson (1893, Hampton University Art Gallery, Virginia).
MNH
Martha N. Hagood and Jefferson C. Harrison, _American Art at the Chrysler Museum: Selected Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings_ (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2005), 110-111, no. 67.