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Clementine Hunter

This painting has been authenticated from photographs by Hunter expert Tom Whitehead.

Lot note:
Self-taught artist Clementine Hunter was born in 1887 on the Hidden Hill Plantation in rural Louisiana, where her grandparents had been slaves. At the age of twelve, she moved with her family to Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches Parish, where they worked as sharecroppers. In addition to laboring as a field hand, Clementine worked as a cook and housekeeper for the former plantation, which had been turned into a retreat for visiting artists. Inspired by the left-behind artists' paint and brushes, she began to make art in her 50s.

In Hunter’s paintings, she depicts everyday life of the black families and workers on the plantation, with figures picking cotton and pecans, or celebrating at weddings and baptisms. Additionally, she often painted Biblical scenes, such as the present artwork, Nativity Scene. As noted by Tom Whitehead, the preeminent scholar on the artist, Hunter had no comprehension of what the Middle East looked like, so she painted Mary and Baby Jesus under a banana tree, the best source of shade at Melrose Plantation. Only two Wise Men are included in the composition, as the artist ran out of space on the board, and these two figures present a pineapple, a holiday treat at Melrose, and a cake covered with cellophane. It is details such as these that makes Hunter’s naïve work so strikingly charming

A 1953 article in Look magazine drew national attention to the artist. Three years later, the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art) organized a solo exhibition for Hunter, the first for an African-American artist by a Louisiana museum - even though the segregation laws at the time prohibited Hunter from entering the exhibition space during public viewing hours. Radcliffe College included Hunter in its Black Women Oral History Project, published in 1980. Northwestern State University of Louisiana granted her an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts degree in 1986. Her artworks are found in many public collections including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the American Folk Art Museum, New York, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Hunter has been the subject of biographies and artist studies, and inspired other works of art. In 2013, composer Robert Wilson presented a new opera about her life, titled Zinnias: the Life of Clementine Hunter, at Montclair State University in New Jersey.