by Emily Burkhart
March 23, 2024
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988) in 1979. Photograph by Judith Sedwick as part of the Black Women Oral History Project, Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard University. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
"I paint the history of my people"
-Clementine Hunter
One of the most celebrated twentieth-century Southern painters, the prolific Creole folk artist Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988) created well over 5,000 paintings from the late 1930s until her death in 1988–an extraordinary output for someone who did not pick up a paintbrush and begin “marking pictures,” as she described it, until her mid-fifties. Hunter was illiterate and entirely self-taught. Her work has drawn comparisons to Grandma Moses (1860-1961), another famous American folk artist who did not start painting until later in life, earning Hunter the nickname the “black Grandma Moses.”
A descendant of slaves, Hunter’s “memory paintings,” as she also referred to her work, most often depict her experience of plantation life in the early twentieth-century in the Cane River Valley of Louisiana. Hunter drew upon her memories and dreams to create vivid paintings of picking cotton, harvesting pecans, boiling wash, funerals, baptisms, other religious scenes, recreation, and brawls at the local honky tonk as well as still lifes and even abstracts. She also produced a number of quilts and painted a renowned mural of plantation life located on the second floor of the African House on Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches Parish, where she spent most of her 101 years.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Grandmother’s Garden, 1962. Oil on board, 18 x 24 in. Gilley’s Gallery, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Image courtesy of Gilley’s Gallery.
Photograph of Clementine Hunter outside her cabin on Melrose Plantation in Natchitoches, Louisiana, in the 1960s. State Library of Louisiana. Image courtesy of 64 Parishes.
Childhood and Early Life
Clementine Hunter was born in late December 1886 into a family of sharecroppers on Hidden Hill Plantation in the Cane River Valley of northwestern Louisiana. She was the eldest of Mary Antoinette Adams and Janvier “John” Reuben’s seven children. Although her exact date of birth remains unknown and some sources cite her birth year as 1887, Hunter said she was born around Christmas. She was of African, Native American, French, and Irish descent. Her maternal grandparents were Virginia slaves who were brought to Louisiana. Her paternal grandfather had been a horse trader during the Civil War who died before Hunter was born, but she was close to her paternal grandmother, a black and Native American woman she called mémé. Hunter was called Clémence early in her life but was baptized Clementiam on March 19, 1887, when she was about three months old. Her family used the nickname Tébé, French for “little baby.” Later she would call herself Clementine.
When Hunter was around five years old, her parents sent her to St. John the Baptist Catholic Church School, but due to its harsh rules and segregationist policies, Hunter left after less than a year never learning to read or write. She began working in the fields at Hidden Hill Plantation at the age of eight, picking cotton alongside her father. Throughout Hunter’s childhood, the family moved around the Cane River Valley wherever her father worked, living in Robeline, Cypress, and Alexandria. The family moved to Yucca (later renamed Melrose) Plantation in Natchitoches Parish in 1902 when she was twelve. Hunter lived at Melrose until it was sold to Southdown Land Company in 1970, after which she lived nearby in a trailer down a dirt road until her death in 1988.
Melrose Plantation
Melrose is one of the largest plantations in the United States built by and for free black people. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1974. Today, Melrose (and its African House with murals by Hunter), is one of twelve sites in the Historic Artists’ Homes & Studios network that celebrates the contributions of American women artists. In 1902, Hunter’s father Janvier was hired as a laborer by John Hampton Henry, then owner of Melrose. Her mother died a few years later in 1905. Hunter herself worked on the plantation in several capacities initially picking cotton, as illustrated in her painting Picking Cotton (1950s) and doing laundry as shown in Washday (1950s). In autumn, she would also harvest pecans. Working six days a week much of the year, she worked at Melrose for seventy-five years.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Picking Cotton, 1950s. Oil on board, 20 x 24 in. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Image courtesy of the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Washday, 1950s. Oil paint on fiberboard, 23 15/16 x 23 15/16 x ¼ in. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1907, when Hunter was about twenty, she gave birth to her first child with Charles Dupree, a mechanic fifteen years her senior with whom she had two children. Hunter and Dupree never married, and he died in 1914. Ten years later, Clementine married Emmanuel Hunter, a woodchopper at the plantation. Together, they would have five children, two of which were stillborn, while living in a worker’s cabin at Melrose. Until her marriage to Emmanuel, Clementine spoke only Creole French; he taught her American English. Hunter worked in the fields at Melrose until her thirties when, in the late 1920s, Carmelite Henry, the wife of John Hampton Henry, employed her to do domestic work as a cook and housekeeper at the “Big House.” After John Hampton Henry died in 1917, his widow opened her home to writers and artists, hosting them for extended stays to live and work, and turning Melrose into an art colony–surely, a development that must have influenced Hunter.
Clementine Hunter, Melrose Plantation, Louisiana, 1948. Photo by Carlotta M. Copron. Gelatin silver print, 12⅜ by 9⅞ in. New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, Louisiana. Image courtesy of the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Painting Career
Prior to painting, Hunter expressed her creativity through fine sewing, doll making, producing textiles, and quilting which she continued throughout her life such as in her Melrose Quilt (ca. 1960). The Henry family had purchased Melrose in 1899, and began restoring architectural structures on the grounds and moving historic log cabins from the area onto the property. Melrose Quilt portrays several notable buildings on the plantation including the Big House (center) where the Henrys lived, Yucca House (top), Ghana House (bottom left), and African House (bottom right), where in 1955 at the age of sixty-eight Hunter would paint her well known mural of plantation life.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Detail of mural inside African House. Melrose Plantation, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. Image courtesy of South Writ Large.
Clementine Hunter (ca.1886-1988), Melrose Quilt, ca. 1960. Fabric, 73 x 60 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Hunter began to paint at some point in the late 1930s. In 1945, using discarded tubes of oils left at Melrose by the New Orleans artist Alberta Kinsey and an old window shade, Hunter is said to have created her first “real” painting known as Panorama of Baptism on Cane River. Hunter did not title her paintings. When asked for a title, she would provide a description or explanation. Her paintings can be seen as a record of her experiences growing up, living, and working on a plantation the majority of her life.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Panorama of Baptism on Cane River, 1945. Oil on window shade. Gift of the Roger H. Ogden Collection. Image courtesy of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, Louisiana.
In the beginning she painted using readily available materials such as house paint on cardboard, paper bags, scrap wood, snuff boxes, cutting boards, wine bottles, and milk jugs before moving on to the more conventional materials of oil and watercolors on canvas to create images of Southern living and religious traditions such as Baptism (ca.1950) and Funeral at St. Augustine’s (early 1970s), depicting the local Catholic church. Her reminiscences are colorful and direct yet lyrical, her honesty refreshing and poignant.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Baptism, ca. 1950. Oil on board, 15 ½ x 19 ½ in. The Melvin Holmes Collection of African American Art, San Francisco, California. Image courtesy of The Melvin Homes Collection of African American Art.
Clementine Hunter (1887-1988), Funeral at St. Augustine, early 1970s. 17½ x 23¼ in. Estimate: $4,000-6,000. Offered in Outsider Art on February 3, 2022 at Christie’s in New York. Image courtesy of Christie’s.
In 1939, the French writer François Mignon (1899-1980), curator of the plantation, noticed her talent and gave her paints and materials. Originally from New York, Mignon became Hunter’s friend and helped promote her work for three decades. He arranged for her paintings to be displayed at a local drugstore where they sold for a dollar each. He also co-authored a cookbook with her on traditional Creole cuisine, the Melrose Plantation Cookbook (1956), that featured photographs of Melrose Plantation with illustrations by Hunter.
Clementine Hunter at left with Melrose Plantation curator Francois Mignon in an undated photo. Image courtesy of The Shreveport Times, Shreveport, Louisiana.
James Register, a Melrose visitor and professor at the University of Oklahoma, also gave Hunter art supplies and support. He helped her learn to sign her paintings. She began signing with a straightforward “CH” from the mid-1940s into the 1950s as can be seen on the delightful Fishing from 1956. The signature developed further into a stylized backwards “C” overlapping an “H” as on the happy flowers picture Pinwheels (Spider Lilies, 1960s). After the death of her husband, Hunter was left to work full-time and care for her children alone while painting at night. She put a sign on the outside of her cabin that read, "Clementine Hunter, Artist. 25 cents to Look.” It was through Register’s efforts that Hunter received a Julius Rosenwald Foundation grant for African American visual artists in 1944.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Fishing, 1956. Oil on board, 17¼ x 23½ in. Estimate: $5,000-7,000. Offered in Outsider Art on February 3, 2022 at Christie’s in New York. Image courtesy of Christie’s.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Pinwheels (Spider Lilies), 1960s. Oil on canvas, 30 x 24 in. Gilley’s Gallery, Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Image courtesy of Gilley’s Gallery.
Both Mignon and Register are credited with encouraging Hunter’s talent and setting her on the path toward recognition. With their support, her first shows were in 1945 in Brownwood, Rosenwald Grant, and Waco, Texas. An exhibition of Hunter's paintings at the New Orleans Arts and Crafts Show in 1949 brought even wider attention to her work. And a June 16, 1953, article in Look magazine entitled “Innocence Regained” featuring Hunter in her cabin at Melrose surrounded by her paintings brought her to national prominence. She became the first African American artist to receive a solo exhibition at the Delgado Museum (now the New Orleans Museum of Art) in 1956. Recognizing the growing interest in her work, Hunter took charge of her image and success. She mounted pay-to-see exhibitions at her home, charged visitors to take pictures with her for 50 cents apiece, sold her work (for modest prices), and even created the occasional self-portrait, such as 1981’s Untitled–a modest acknowledgement of her growing acclaim.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Untitled, 1981. Oil and collage on canvas board, 14 x 18 in. National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Image courtesy of the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
She also produced many astonishingly modern takes on her subject matter such as the portrait Grandpa (ca. 1960) and the aforementioned Grandmother’s Garden (1962).
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Grandpa, ca. 1960. Oil on masonite, 17 x 21 in. Image courtesy of Pinterest.
Death and Forgery
Self-taught, most often painting what she remembered in an “idiosyncratic artistic style”–brightly colored, simply rendered without scale, perspective, shadow–her work is the epitome of folk art yet, her sensibility is not just nostalgic. By the time of her death at age 101 on January 1, 1988, Hunter had become widely known. Eminent institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of American Folk Art in New York had mounted exhibitions. But forgeries of her work had begun circulating throughout the country. With the help of Thomas Whitehead, who had been a personal friend of Hunter’s and was a Clementine Hunter art expert, the FBI finally caught those responsible in 2009. It was the first FBI case of its kind, it legitimized folk art and protected Hunter’s legacy.
Today, Clementine Hunter’s works sell for thousands of dollars at auction and are in many private and public collections, including that of Oprah Winfrey and the late Joan Rivers as well as the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her life and art have been the subject of books, and her paintings were featured on a 2013 episode of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow. That same year, Robert Wilson, who had met Hunter when he was twelve years old, premiered his opera entitled “Zinnias: The Life of Clementine Hunter” at Montclair State University in New Jersey. Common in the South, zinnias were one of Hunter’s favorite flowers and she painted the stately blooms many times throughout her career.
Clementine Hunter (ca. 1886-1988), Zinnias in a Pot, 1965. Oil on board, 32 x 28 in. Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia. Image courtesy of the Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art.