Art: Bishop Hill Beards

Bishop Hill, Ill. (pop. 208), site of one of earliest Swedish religious communes in the Midwest, was all astir last week. Carpenters were busily plugging a hole carelessly burned in the Old Colony Church roof last April while townsfolk prepared to feed several thousand visitors next week at a picnic to celebrate the 90th Anniversary of the purchase from the U. S. Government of the Bishop Hill colony’s land. Simultaneously, the attention of U. S. art critics was being called to Bishop Hill because it had just been discovered that the Old Colony Church housed the nation’s largest and hairiest collection of primitive portraits.

Early in the 19th Century, a fanatical Swede named Eric Janson founded a cult whose simple theology was based on the single tenet that the Bible was the only book that could properly be used in religious services. Even hymnals were considered by Eric Janson to be worldly gauds. Oppressed in Sweden by orthodox authorities, Eric Janson sent a boatload of his followers to pioneer a colony in the U. S. The first shipload of Jansonites went down in mid-Atlantic with all hands. Janson and a second company of his followers succeeded in reaching Illinois in 1846, purchased their first parcel of 60 acres in Henry County, called the settlement Bishop Hill.

Founder Janson passed out of the picture early, being murdered in 1850 by a jealous husband named John Root. The colony’s history thereafter paralleled that of most 19th century U. S. religious Utopias. Disease and crop failure due to unfamiliarity with the land killed off many. Next came a period of self-sufficiency and content, followed by dissatisfaction and dissolution. The colony’s 10,857 communal acres were split up in 1879.

Unlike most ventures of its kind, the Bishop Hill colony left many memorabilia in its wake. The original church, school, blacksmith shop, inn, town hall remain. Thanks to a tipsy Civil War veteran who turned to painting because it was less arduous than horseshoeing, a gallery of 93 oils, among them a stack of portraits of the men who built Bishop Hill was also left behind.

Late in the 1570’s Olof Krans whose art was entirely self-taught, began painting the Jansonites. Between drinking bouts he kept at it for years, doing his friends and neighbors in return for enough money to get another bottle. Since the Bishop Hill males happened to be strong individualists who rarely shaved, the resulting gallery is not only historically but barbaryologically noteworthy.

Students of the whisker,* noting that not one Bishop Hiller cut his facial hair alike, observed the following beards on the following faces:

¶ Artist Krans below his buffalo-horn mustache sported a full goatee, or Imperial. Reaching its greatest glory on the person of Vittorio Emanuele II, this type of whisker was named for the slightly less imposing beard of Napoleon III.

¶ Colonist Andrew Stonberg favored the barbiche, a short beard covering the entire chin, currently favored by young Italian Fascisti.

¶ The sideburn, burnsides, mutton chops, or cōtelette was worn by Colonist Eric Olson. Famed throughout the Civil War period by the air with which General Ambrose Everett Burnside wore it, the cōtelette, when connected with the mustache, is known in Austria as the Kaiser Franz Josef bart.

¶ Dandy of Bishop Hill, John Wallin preferred the Newgate Fringe, a half moon of whiskers about a bald face.

¶ Patriotic Olof Broline affected the Lincoln, covered his chin clear back to the ears with stiff white bristles.

In addition to Bishop Hill’s beards Olof Krans painted many a Rousseauesque scene of life in the old colony. Most startling was a group of shawled and coated women huddled about what looked like a guillotine on a platform over a little river. They were the women of Bishop Hill operating a primitive pile driver.

Another early Krans beloved of the colony’s descendants showed a fiercelooking Jansonite settler in his Lapland boots, buffalo robe coat, wide leather belt scaring the daylights out of a Plains Indian. Most decorative was a scene of seven scythe-swinging reapers, moving rhythmically over a gigantic wheat field while the women followed behind, gathering and binding the sheaves.

*Manhattan’s famed Hair-Cutter Charles De Zemler, “Historian of the Profession,” is now preparing to publish his 25-year research on barbering.