The subject of this painting is actor George Fitzgerald, who also served as the model for Walt Kuhn’s The Man from Eden [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Walt Kuhn, The Man from Eden, 1930, oil on canvas, Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Gift of Mrs. Theodore G. Kenefick, 1956 (1956:8). Image: Albright-Knox Art Gallery / Art Resource, NY and The Camp Cook [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Walt Kuhn, The Camp Cook, 1931, oil on canvas, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica. Image: Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute / Art Resource, NY. Kuhn’s biographer, Philip Rhys Adams, stated that Fitzgerald was represented by a booking agency that had “an intuitive sense of Kuhn’s requirements and sent him many useful models over the years.” In the book that he wrote with Paul Bird in 1940, Kuhn recalled that the “Lincolnian figure” in The Man from Eden was “not from the Garden of Eden, but Eden, Wisconsin where he grew up as a farm boy. He drifted with the show business to New York, and eventually to the artist’s studio. He is a loyal admirer of art and artists and enjoys posing for such reflective pictures.” Fitzgerald and the Kuhn family remained in touch between the execution of the three compositions, which spanned six years. Fitzgerald sent the artist a postcard from Santa Fe, New Mexico, in February 1933, signing it “the Camp Cook & Man From Eden.”
In Wisconsin, as in The Man from Eden, Kuhn portrayed Fitzgerald with a blank expression, his lips slightly parted midsentence or lost in thought. Fitzgerald faces and stares to the left of the viewer. By reducing the scale from the half-length of the previous paintings of Fitzgerald to the bust-length of Wisconsin, Kuhn centered and placed greater emphasis on the sitter’s face. His sunken cheeks and the dark circles under his eyes imply the toll of physical labor. He wears a wide-brimmed hat—despite the indoor setting—and a simple shirt with an open collar. Wisconsin was not intended as a portrait of a specific individual but as a study of American ruggedness. Kuhn completed other bust-length paintings exploring this theme, including The Guide (1931, Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln) and Woodsman (1933, private collection). The artist spent summers in Ogunquit, Maine, where he may have taken inspiration from the townspeople to work on such a project.
Kuhn and his wife, Vera, kept meticulous records, and they recorded that Wisconsin was the “biggest all around success” when it was first shown at the Marie Harriman Gallery in 1937. In a review of the exhibition, critic Margaret Breuning remarked that both Wisconsin and Juggler [fig. 3]
[fig. 3] Walt Kuhn, Juggler, 1934, oil on canvas, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Gift of the Friends of Art, 38-1 showed “a penetration of character that passes far beyond the realism of literal record into the fusing of subjective values and factual statement. The significance that the artist found in these subjects is interspersed with simplicity and power in a thoroughly personal idiom.” That same year another critic praised Kuhn’s penetrating insight into human character and concluded that in both the “serene records of the Wisconsin countryman” and Dryad, also in the National Gallery’s collection, the artist had achieved “far deeper characterization and a much more sweeping rhythm” than in some of his circus subjects. A trustee of the Wichita Art Museum considered purchasing Wisconsin in 1940 but did not do so, the Kuhns speculated, because it “did not have enough glamour.” The painting remained in the collection of the artist’s family until his daughter, Brenda Kuhn, donated it to the National Gallery in 1968.
Robert Torchia
July 24, 2024
