Believing that art education comes from within the soul, Pippin rose from poverty to become one of America's best-known black painters.
Born on February 22, 1888 in West Chester, Pennsylvania, as a child Horace Pippin began drawing with whatever materials he could find. He sent a sketch in to a magazine contest and won a set of paints and a box of crayons, and while he was later offered the chance to go to art school, his mother had become ill and Pippin needed to work to help support her.
Early Years and World War I
Pippin took a series of various jobs – on farms, in warehouses and hotels, unloading coal – to name a few. He then served in World War I and was stationed in France, where he was shot in the right shoulder and seriously wounded. Pippin received the Croix de Guerre for bravery and, following his return to the United States, married Jennie Featherstone Wade in 1920.
Pippin’s injury in combat inspired his first oil painting, which he called End of The War: Starting Home. He turned to art for both physical and mental therapy, to help strengthen muscles in his right arm still damaged from the injury, and to try to free himself of nightmarish war images that had stayed in his mind for over a decade. This painting and Pippin’s other war works are cited as being among the best expressions of the grueling reality of battle and military life.
First Successes and Style
Pippin soon attracted the attention of some influential Philadelphians, including painter N.C. Wyeth and art collector Dr. Alfred C. Barnes. Following his first gallery show in 1940 and inclusion in a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, Horace Pippin’s fame as an artist began to grow. He exhibited at various other museums and galleries throughout the United States, and was compared to French artist Henri Rousseau by Newsweek, which cited Pippin’s deceptively simple, vivid style and strong use of color. By the coming of World War II, Pippin’s paintings were selling almost as soon as he finished them.
Horace Pippin’s subject matter for his paintings was diverse. While he took on more serious, racially influenced matters such as his Abraham Lincoln and abolitionist John Brown series and works titled Mr. Prejudice and Cabin in the Cotton, Pippin also painted everyday moments and people – both white and black. Furthermore, Pippin was insistent that artists should not be overly taught, and that what an artist felt and the way he or she wanted to express it was more important than too much focus on theory or technique. As Pippin himself said, "Pictures just come to my mind; I think them out with my brain, and then I tell my heart to go ahead."
Legacy
Horace Pippin had come very far from the boy who had started with just a box of crayons and some watercolors. His newfound fame, however, caused stress and strain in his personal life and his wife soon entered a Pennsylvania mental hospital. In 1946, Pippin suffered a fatal stroke, dying at the height of his popularity. Not surprisingly, he had an unfinished painting on his easel, just like the many unfinished aspects of Pippin’s career and future potential.
Horace Pippin’s work is part of the permanent collections of many American museums, including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Barnes Foundation, The Phillips Collection, and The Whitney Museum. In 1994, a traveling retrospective of his paintings was put together by The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts under the name I Tell My Heart: The Art of Horace Pippin.
Sources
- Horace Pippin - Answers.com
- The Phillips Collection - Horace Pippin
- Long Island University: African-Americans in the Visual Arts – Horace Pippin
