Artist Blythe’s gritty realism clear in recently sold ‘Bachelor’s Hall’
For 170 years, descendants of J.J. Gillespie, owner of a Pittsburgh art gallery, cherished two paintings by David Gilmour Blythe: “Bachelor’s Hall” and “The Hideout.”
A self-taught artist and poet, Blythe earned a living by painting portraits but is best known for satirizing the characters who prowled Pittsburgh’s smoky streets in the 19th century.
Four generations of Gillespie relatives owned “Bachelor’s Hall” before it was offered for sale twice in 2018 by Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati. The painting, also known as “The Bachelors,” failed to sell both times or meet its minimum estimate of $15,000.
Last fall, three Pittsburgh bachelors who collect art purchased the painting for $9,000 and hope to exhibit it locally.
“Bachelor’s Hall” shows four men gathered in a small room, possibly in a boarding house. On the far left, a man uses a fork to spear sausage that he is cooking over an open fire. Behind him, a man pours a steaming liquid into a coffee pot.
A third man shaves with a straight razor while looking into a broken mirror. A fourth has removed his trousers and peers intently through his eyeglasses while mending them. In the middle of the canvas, a black cat stretches to paw food from the table.
On one wall, the last page of a daily calendar is visible, a clue that the men may be preparing to call on friends and family on New Year’s Day. The custom, popularized in America by Dutch immigrants, allowed bachelors to scout for marriage prospects while visiting families with single young women.
On the table is a round loaf of bread. Round bread, cookies, honey cake, doughnuts steeped in rum, eggs and pancakes were often served on New Year’s Day, indicating that the year had come full circle.
“They are getting ready to have friends visit, which is why they are making food, and they are getting ready to visit friends, which is why one guy is shaving and the other is mending his pants,” said Mark S. Johnson, a Dormont graphic artist and past president of the Daguerrerian Society.
Mr. Johnson bought the painting in November with Kevin Balazs, an art conservator who lives in Dormont, and art historian Gary
Grimes of Mt. Lebanon. Mr. Grimes has spent more than 35 years researching the work of Western Pennsylvania artists in libraries, on microfilm and at historical societies.
Mr. Grimes believes that Blythe, who was a bachelor most of his life, was inspired by the poem “Bachelor’s Hall,” which appeared several times in Pittsburgh newspapers.
Blythe was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, in 1815, left school at 16 and was apprenticed to Joseph Woodwell, a Pittsburgh woodcarver. While serving in the Navy from 1837 to 1840, he traveled through Florida, the West Indies and to Boston and New York.
When he returned home, he earned a living as a traveling painter who did portraits of a town’s prominent citizens, then moved on to the next community.
By April 1844, Blythe was renting a studio on Wood Street in Downtown. “Bachelor’s Hall” is one of the artist’s largest works — 36 by 32 inches and surrounded by a gilded wooden frame. Mr. Balazs cleaned surface grime from the canvas, which bears the artist’s signature in the lower left corner. “It’s in beautiful condition. There are no holes in it. There’s no damage. We also think that Blythe made the frame, because he was trained in cabinetry,” Mr. Balazs said. By the time he painted “Bachelor’s Hall,” “Blythe had moved from being a mere copyist of the Dutch and English genre style to being a uniquely American painter,” Mr. Balazs said. “Every
other American genre painter was painting sweetness and light — rosy, wholesome subjects.”
Mr. Johnson theorizes that Blythe painted “Bachelor’s Hall” at the end of 1846 or beginning of 1847. He suspects he may have needed money to get married and hoped to sell the painting. A Presbyterian, Blythe was wooing Julia Ann Keffer, a beautiful Catholic woman who lived in Uniontown and came from a prosperous family in East Liverpool.
In September 1848, Blythe married Miss Keffer in St. Paul Cathedral, then located in Downtown. The couple’s bliss was short-lived. Around 1850, she died of consumption or typhoid.
“It’s one of the few paintings that was made while his wife, Julia Keffer, was alive,” Mr. Johnson said.
“Bachelor’s Hall” does not appear in a 1981 exhibition catalog called “The World of David Gilmour Blythe.” Considered a complete list of the artist’s works, the catalog relies heavily on research by art historian Bruce W. Chambers, who died in 2007. But Chambers knew about “Bachelor’s Hall” and mentions it in his 1974 doctoral dissertation that he wrote at the University of Pennsylvania.
About 10 years later, Blythe returned to the subject of men living together in “The Hideout.” This painting, which is owned by a West Coast collector, shows five men engaged in everyday tasks.
One is cooking eggs over an open fire while another stands at a table making coffee. A third man is shaving and the fourth is mending his trousers. A black and white cat laps up liquid pouring out of a tankard. On a barely visible ladder, a fifth man descends from a sleeping loft.
Mr. Johnson said the five men look very familiar. “It sort of looks like the same characters 10 years later. It’s very dirty and unkempt. Their lives did not improve.”
Paul Chew, the late director of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, assessed Blythe’s ability in an 1981 exhibition catalog, “Southwestern Pennsylvania Painters: 1800-1845.”
Blythe painted with “humanity, truth, vitality and often sharply satirical wit,” he wrote. He had a “highly accomplished, realistic style with composition, color and modeling adjusted to each subject.”
Contemporary observers were not so kind. Two local newspapers commented when “Bachelor’s Hall” was exhibited at J.J. Gillespie’s gallery in Pittsburgh in
March 1847.
The Commercial Journal called the painting “too rough and unnatural, with the exception of one figure — that of the fellow mending his clothes — which is in Mr. B.’s best style.”
The Daily Morning Post was more pointed.
“We fear that Messrs.
Gillespie, Wood Street, may be persecuted for libel. That painting in the window, purporting to be a representation of bachelor’s life, is certainly very scandalous . ... ”