Clementine Hunter (c. 1887-1988) was a prolific painter who didn’t pick up her first paintbrush until her 50s. She’s one of Louisiana’s most celebrated artists. Though she never traveled more than 100 miles from her hometown, her paintings have been displayed in exhibitions and galleries all over the country.
Clementine Hunter (c. 1887-1988) was a prolific painter who didn’t pick up her first paintbrush until her 50s. She’s one of Louisiana’s most celebrated artists. Though she never traveled more than 100 miles from her hometown, her paintings have been displayed in exhibitions and galleries all over the country.
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Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan. This is Womanica.
This month, we’re highlighting women who’ve led dynamic lives. Ones that have shifted, evolved and bloomed, often later in life.
Today we’re talking about a prolific painter who didn’t pick up her first paintbrush until her 50s. She’s one of Louisiana’s most celebrated artists. Though she never traveled more than 100 miles from her hometown, her paintings have been displayed in exhibitions and galleries all over the country.
Please welcome Clementine Hunter.
An old plantation sits along a bend on the shore of the Cane River, which winds down the northwest corner of Louisiana. There’s a small two-story barn on these plantation grounds that looks like a mushroom – it’s short, made with whitewashed brick, and crowned with a huge shingle roof. The roof’s overhang reaches so far beyond the walls of the house that it needs long beams to hold it up.
Inside, on the second floor, the walls are covered with large oil-on-plywood murals. Clementine Hunter painted these 9 panels in 1955. They tell the story of daily life on the plantation, sourced from Clementine’s rich memories, against a pastel sky of pinks and blues. And they were her masterpiece.
Clementine was born in the late 1880s on the Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, Louisiana. Legend has it, Hidden Hill was the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Clementine’s parents, Janvier and Antoinette Ruben, were Creole field laborers. They put their daughter in a Catholic school to receive a formal education but Clementine did not like it much. She kept running away. After a while she stopped going and started working in the fields instead.
When Clementine was 15 years old her family moved to the Melrose plantation to work. Both Clementine and her father began by working as farm hands. Clementine would work in the fields for more than 20 years , picking cotton and harvesting pecans. She married twice and had seven children between her two husbands. She was promoted when she was in her 40s to being a housekeeper for Cammie Henry, the wife of the estate’s owner.
Cammie had decided to use the main house as a retreat space for artists and writers. In 1939, an artist left behind some paintbrushes and some paint tubes, which Clementine found while cleaning.
Clementine took to painting on anything she could find. Old window shades, glass bottles, cardboard boxes, and gourds. Though she used the paint sparingly she painted vivid scenes of farmwork and the memories of her life along the Cane river.
There were depictions of harvesting pecans, picking cotton, and laboring in the garden. Images of Church day,wash day, funerals and baptisms.
Clementine didn’t care to use a realistic perspective in her work. Instead it leaned toward the surreal and the personal.
She also didn’t know how to spell her name, so she signed her works with a backwards C and H monogram and began selling them for less than a dollar. Cara Zimmermann, a specialist in folk art at Christie’s in New York, said:
“You can physically trace her evolution through her works. As she started to make a little money, she applied paint more generously and used more vibrant colors. As she received more recognition, her signature became more stylised.”
Clementine painted at night, beside a kerosene lamp in her four-roomed, tin-roofed cabin. She mainly painted from memory, stating: "I just get it in my mind and I just go ahead and paint but I can't look at nothing and paint. No trees, no nothing. I just make my own tree in my mind, that's the way I paint."
Over the next 40 years Clementine painted more than 5,000 paintings. Her lifework amounted to a vibrant record of Black life along the Cane river. Of a culture that revolved around a way of life that was disappearing as more and more machines were used in agriculture. Towards the end of her life her work was displayed in museums and celebrated by celebrities and curators.
Even with her success, Clementine chose to sell her paintings at modest prices and stay in Louisiana. She worked at Melrose Plantation until 1970 when she moved to a small trailer a few miles away on an unmarked road.
She died in 1988 at the age of 101.
Reflecting on Clementine Hunter’s work, Cara Zimmermann said, “‘What people love about Hunter is her simple desire to create. …It was just her unadulterated way of making sense of her existence.”
All month, we’re highlighting dynamos. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram @womanicapodcast.
Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator.
Talk to you tomorrow!