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(1846-1905) Maria Howard Weeden was born in 1846, six months after her
father, Dr. William Weeden, died unexpectedly while on a business trip
to New Orleans. Her mother, Jane, and five other siblings
lived in the house.
Howard (as she was called), although physically frail enjoyed a
comfortable and privileged youth in her
Huntsville
home. It was in her youth
that she began to develop her natural artistic inclinations.
Apparently her mother both recognized and encouraged her
daughter’s talent and took her to study art with William Frye, a
well-known portrait painter, then living in Huntsville.
She attended Huntsville Female Seminary, which included art in their curriculum.
The Civil War changed their comfortable life and her three brothers
enlisted in the Confederate army soon after the war began.
On
April 11, 1862
, when Federal forces occupied
Huntsville, the war came directly to the doorsteps of fifteen-year-old
Howard, her mother, and her sister Kate.
Federal officers appropriated their home, located only a short
distance from both the Federal headquarters and the courthouse square.
Forced to live for a time in their own slave quarters, the Weedens
eventually fled to
Tuskegee
to reside with her married sister, Jane.
During their three year stay in Tuskegee, two things occurred that
were to influence the course of her life.
She enrolled in the Tuskegee
Female
Methodist
College, where her art teacher, Julia Spear, admired and encouraged her
work. She also formed a
lifelong friendship with the family of the college president, Dr. George
W.F. Price, a Methodist minister. Later,
his daughter Elizabeth, was to become her most influential supporter and friend.
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The Weedens again took up residence in
Huntsville
after the war and all three brothers eventually returned to Huntsville, but
the family had little to celebrate.
Much of their property had been destroyed and their home
pillaged. Mrs. Weeden,
facing the prospect of financial ruin, divided the remaining property
among her children, deeding the other plantations to her three sons and
the town house to her two unmarried
daughters, Kate and Howard.
Then nineteen, Howard used her skill with brush and pen to supplement
the family’s income. In
1868 she began publishing stories in the “Christian Observer”, a
Presbyterian newspaper. Adopting
the pen name, “Flake White”, she wrote stories in the highly
romantic style popular at the time.
She also discovered a market for her art in the form of
hand-painted cards, which she designed for a variety of occasions.
Silhouettes and floral illustrations adorned original verses or
carefully chosen passages, which she executed in calligraphy.
After Mrs.Weeden's death, Howard and her sister Kate lived agreed on
a division of duties that allowed Kate to manage the household while
Howard continued to search out ways to make money through her art and
writing. The sisters brought in additional income by taking
in a boarder, who stayed with them until 1896, and by turning the
remaining upstairs bedroom into an art school of sorts, Howard Weeden
offered instruction in drawing and painting to Huntsville’s young girls.
She longed to travel and see the
world's great art works, but her poverty and poor health prevented such
luxuries. Forced to turn to her immediate surrounds, she found in
her own backyard, the subject that was to make her famous - the faces of
former slaves, whom she knew. She had no scarcity of subjects from
which to choose. The famous "Mammy", focus of a number
of her best studies, was Frances Bell, a servant of the Clays, who lived
next door. "Uncle Champ", Governor Patton's former body
servant, worked for the Weedens. "Saint Barley Harris",
was a preacher who baptized more than three thousand members into the
Negro Primitive Baptist Church.
In
1893, she attended the
Columbia
Exposition in
Chicago
and concluded that her work deserved a
wider audience. She had realized that the simplicity and poignancy which
she sought to capture in her work elicited a response distinctly
different from that of her contemporaries. In 1895, seven of her best
portraits were shown in the
Berlin
gallery of Edward Schulte in a "Howard
Weeden Gala." The exhibit was so successful that Ms. Weeden
received a large number of orders for her work. She later had a showing
in Paris.
She
published four books: Shadows on the Wall (1898), Bandanna
Ballads (1899), Songs of the Old South (1901), and Old
Voices (1904). Joel Chandler Harris wrote in the introduction to Bandanna
Ballads, "The art with which the facts are set forth is so
felicitous in its touch, so faithful and so informing, that it goes
deeper than character and individuality; it revives and resurrects the
period; in some mysterious way, it restores the atmosphere and color of
the time. And each portrait stands out as a little masterpiece,
harmonious, powerful, charged with feeling, and illuminated by the
imagination that makes its creations more real than life itself."
Howard Weeden, using her largely
self-taught talents with brush and pen, made a unique contribution to an
era in the history of the South, with faithfulness to fact and with
respect and dignity to the individuals recorded.
Some interesting notes:
-
Thirty four years after Howard Weeden's death, her book, "Bandanna
Ballads" (1899), was used in the production of the American classic
movie, "Gone With the Wind", to copy the costumes of the
slaves.
- Howard Weeden
was commissioned to produce
silhouettes for Charles Dickens' book, "Old Curiosity
Shop".
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