On View
Not on viewObject number1960/1.27
Portrait of a Farmer's Wife
Artist
Robert Gwathmey
(American, 1903-1988)
Date1954
Mediumscreenprint
Dimensionsmat: 24 × 20 in. (61 × 50.8 cm)
sheet: 22 1/4 × 17 1/2 in. (56.5 × 44.5 cm)
image: 17 in. × 13 1/4 in. (43.2 × 33.7 cm)
sheet: 22 1/4 × 17 1/2 in. (56.5 × 44.5 cm)
image: 17 in. × 13 1/4 in. (43.2 × 33.7 cm)
Credit LineDirector's Fund
Exhibition History"Highlights from the Permanent Collection: Prints and Drawings," KIA Long Gallery (Sept. 15 - Nov. 25, 2001).
"Second Sight/Insight," KIA Long Gallery (Dec. 11, 2004 - Mar. 6, 2005).
"Passion on Paper: Masterly Prints from the KIA Collection," March 17 - July 15, 2018, Groos Gallery.
"American Realism: Visions of America 1900-1950," Muskegon Museum of Art (May 11 - August 27, 2023); Flint Institute of Arts (September 9 - December 30, 2023); KIA (January 21 - April 14, 2024).Label Text"This screenprint is an adaptation of the artist’s oil painting of the same title created a few years earlier. Gwathmey met this woman in 1944 when he lived among North Carolina tobacco workers while fulfilling an artist’s grant. He wrote, “Farmer’s Wife is my response to a lady of character who has borne the scars of outrageous circumstances and has refused to be destroyed…It was my hope that…I might have been able to extend the dignity and beauty of this lady.…”
Gwathmey was a pioneer in the art of screenprint. He was among a small number of its first proponents in New York in the 1930s. In 1945 he authored a “how-to” article about the process for American Artist magazine. His mastery of techniques can be appreciated in his ability to present a complexity of patterns and shapes unified by lines of varying thickness. Farmer’s Wife is an early masterwork in screenprint (written by Nancy Sojka for Passion on Paper: Masterly Prints from the KIA Collection, 2018)."
