God gave me the power. Sometimes I try to quit paintin’. I can’t. I can’t. —Clementine Hunter

Clementine Hunter brought truth and dignity to the everyday activities of a rural southern agricultural lifestyle that was rapidly fading into history. In her largely matriarchal world, industrious women whose physical toil never ceases run the engine of life. When not engaged in washing, fishing, laundering, picking cotton, or food preparation, they function as the moral compass of their communities, attending church, a baptism, or a funeral. In Hunter’s art, women normalize life; men disrupt it, letting off steam by carousing on rowdy Saturday nights.

Hunter was born into a Louisianan Creole family on Hidden Hill Plantation along the Cane River. Here the family continued the fieldwork of picking cotton and pecans that their enslaved grandparents had done. When she was a teenager, they moved to Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches. The owner, Cammie G. Henry, ran the historic Melrose as something of an artist’s colony situated on a working plantation. By the time Hunter arrived, it was already known for its support of artists in multiple disciplines. Hunter continued to work in the fields until sometime during the 1920s, when she started doing domestic indoor work, cooking, washing, and cleaning. She would clear out the rooms vacated by artists-in-residence, becoming exposed to the tools of artmaking. Sometime in the 1940s, she asked François Mignon, a land- scape artist himself, and the plantation librarian and curator, for permission to try her hand at “marking,” using some tubes of oil paint that had been left behind. She had always been making, whether it was dolls for her children, colorful quilts, basket weaving, or sewing clothes. Mignon recalled providing her with a discarded window shade for canvas and some turpentine. Hunter went on to paint thousands of pictures, mostly in the evening hours when she was finished with work. Using brilliant colors that she mixed on a plywood board, Hunter would sit at a table with a canvas on her lap and paint scenes that she knew intimately from the inside. She earned recognition for her art during her lifetime, eventually needing to distinguish idle visitors from art buyers with a sign posted on her doorframe that charged admission of twenty-five cents just to look.

In this tranquil image of a mother and child engaged in paring apples, the two figures are situated outside in the warm sun. One can almost hear the insects humming. The mother looms large in this setting, with her back straight, head regally inclined in her honest activity, and sitting in a throne-like chair under the shade of a tree that is dwarfed by her figure. The child sits in obeisance at her feet in the shade of an umbrella. In the distance is a structure that strongly resembles the historic Yucca House, the first residence on Melrose Plantation erected between about 1795 and 1800. The name “Clemence” is written along a path on the left-hand side of the painting. Hunter was not able to read or write. For a brief period between 1945 and 1950, her paintings were signed with this name, which she sometimes claimed as her own original name, by James Register, a visiting writer who spent three months at Melrose while researching a book on Louisiana.

Stacy C. Hollander, “Clementine Hunter,” exhibition brochure for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020).