Wash Barnes Cabin

 

Gustave Baumann

  1881 - 1971 (biography)

1912 /14 

color woodcut 

19 3/4 x 26 5/8" image 

pencil signed, lower right 

unnumbered; from an edition of 50 

pencil titled in lower left; Hand-in-Heart chop in signature; monogram, copyright, and letters "DS SC" (abbreviation for Latin "describo" and "sculpsit") carved into the block, in image, lower left 

Chamberlain 32.3 

ivory wove Japanese vellum 

published 

artist 

AB4055 

SOLD

First printed in 1912, this is one of 50 recorded impressions of this bucolic scene made between then and 1914. The first edition of 20 impressions was titled "Cabin in the Hills", followed by ten more impressions with the "Wash Barnes Cabin" title but in a muted colorway. This is from the third and final edition of 20 impressions printed in 1914, in which Baumann has stippled the sky and brought out the large tree in the right by printing the leaves in a brighter ink. In Chamberlain's "In a Modern Rendering - the Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann" an excerpt from Baumann's writings notes:

Social amenities had to be observed with Mother Barnes, who didn't mind artists in fact she was greatly flattered when they came to paint her cabin but she had an undying hate for photographers especially when they snapped her picture unbeknown to her and [compounded] the error by sending her a print of it...The place was a confusion of pictures. There was a split-shingle roof with a chimney that would indicate a huge fireplace, a garden that could hardly contain the flowers within the fence. A lean cow ambled by to somewhere. To give the place a semblance of order a long line of geese marched by scattering the chickens that were packing around while I with a little Brownie Camera under my arm casually snapped a picture of Mother Barnes, when Wash Barnes himself appeared and I found myself invited for lunch with the family.