The Mildred Hart Bailey Estate recently donated three original paintings by folk artist Clementine Hunter to the Center. Bailey, who earned her doctorate in reading from Ole Miss and served as dean of graduate students at Northwestern State University of Louisiana in Natchitoches, collected 120 of Hunter's paintings. Bailey began collecting Hunter's work shortly after returning to Natchitoches from Ole Miss in 1963. She had seen Hunter's paintings for sale almost 20 years earlier in the town's drugstore, but had not thought at the time that they were of any value historically, aesthetically, or culturally. However, something about the paintings stayed with Bailey over the years. Eventually, she went to Hunter's home on Melrose Plantation and bought her first painting, a black Jesus on the cross at Calvary. Bailey returned again and again to buy more paintings, falling in love with Hunter's work and displaying the paintings in prominent places in her home.

Eventually, when Bailey's collection no longer fit in her home, she bought and restored Chaplain House, an 1892 Natchitoches home, to display the paintings. The estate recently distributed the paintings to various universities and museums, the majority of which are now on display at the Louisiana State Museum in New Orleans.

The three paintings given to the Center represent two different periods of Hunter's career. The earliest painting, Armistead When He Was a Boy, dates from the early 1940s. Flight into Egypt, painted in 1963, depicts Joseph leading Mary and Baby Jesus into Egypt. Cotton Picking, also painted in 1963, represents one of Hunter's best known subjects, plantation life, from the view of a servant.

Hunter's art is important because it bears witness to life on a Southern plantation from the perspective of a woman who worked and lived there her entire life. By giving voice to the many who did not have the chance to tell their own stories, her paintings help broaden our view of the cultural history of the early 20th-century South. The gift of Hunter's paintings enriches the Center's ability to chronicle this important viewpoint of Southern culture.

Clementine Hunter: American Folk Artist (Pelican Publishing Company, 1990), by James L. Wilson, provides a detailed biography, some 100 color photographs of the artist's work, an appendix of exhibitions, and a list of permanent collections that display her work.

Anne Evans