Art: Pittsburgh Legend

Son of a Scottish immigrant, David G. Blythe was born May 9, 1815 in a forest clearing near East Liverpool, Ohio. At 16 he was apprenticed to a Pittsburgh woodcarver, later moved on to New York to enlist in the Navy as ship’s carpenter. As a boy he had been good at drawing funny likenesses of his neighbors. When his enlistment was up he drifted back to his home town, set up as an itinerant portrait painter. In those pre-camera days that meant a steady living, a free & easy life.

Tall, lanky David Blythe roved from hotel to boarding house, painted local worthies at about $15 or $20 per head. His artistic ability made such a marked impression on one gentleman that, passing Blythe’s portrait of an acquaintance staring blankly from a store window, he bowed, doffed his hat, murmured: “Good morning.” He made friends and local fame not only by his pictures and convivial eccentricities but by the reams of flowery verse he wrote for local newspapers under the pen name “Boots.”

In 1847 Painter Blythe became engaged to pretty, popular Julia Keffer of East Liverpool, settled down over a store in Uniontown, Pa., seat of Fayette County. He was commissioned to carve a huge wooden statue of Lafayette for the new county courthouse, which made citizens of nearby Waynesburg, seat of Greene County, want a similar monument to General Greene. When he asked $300 for the job, Waynesburgers hotly replied that they did'”not propose to give him the whole county for his work,” hired a local craftsman. Painter Blythe retorted with a long poem in the Uniontown newspaper criticizing Waynesburg’s manners, clothes, public houses, beds, women. A Greene County poet replied in angry verse, drawing from Blythe a counter attack in which his adversary was compared to a pumpkin, Greene County to a “sow grown fat with buttermilk and meal.”

There followed shortly the two great blows of David Blythe’s life. Pretty Julia Keffer died a year after he married her. He painted an enormous panorama of western Pennsylvania landscapes and historical scenes, mounted it on rollers and dreamed of making a fortune by taking it on tour. In its premiere at Uniontown, Pa. the last scene, a realistic canvas of a thunderstorm, so scared the more naive spectators that they refused to leave the theatre until assured that no thunder was crashing outside. But the tour flopped, the panorama was cut up to make theatrical backdrops. Painter Blythe took to serious drinking. Settling in Pittsburgh, he revolted against flattering portraiture, turned to caricature.

At once the skill he had been acquiring by years of hack work was set free. Still a back-country village, Pittsburgh was just the place for a man with an embittered soul, a keen eye for the grotesque and a liking for the rough & tumble life of taverns and streets. David Blythe painted drunks, loafers, pickpockets, runaway horses, grinning bill-collectors, swaying stagecoaches. With warm colors and swift, vigorous draughtsmanship, he poked fun at such everyday events as the rump-bumping scramble for mail in Post Office (see cut) or a lawyer braying at a gaping jury in A Court Room Scene.

Displayed in the windows of J. J. Gillespie’s art store, his lusty satires “attracted such crowds that one could hardly get along the street.” Artist Blythe turned them all over to Gillespie’s, got a permanent drawing account in return, never took more than $5 at a time. Unkempt, red-whiskered, hard-drinking and contemptuous of his new popularity, he was brusque with leading citizens, ran off to be a camp follower during the Civil War, died in 1865.

David Blythe was a Pittsburgh legend for years after his death, but hardly anyone outside western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio had heard of him until Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute exhumed some of his paintings from the countryside’s parlors, gave them a showing in 1932. Last week Manhattan’s Whitney Museum of American Art rounded up all the Blythe pictures it could get, put them on exhibition beside the works of another, long-forgotten Pennsylvanian, Joseph Boggs (“The Professor”) Beale, whose lively drawings were lately discovered in the attic of a onetime Philadelphia lantern-slide maker (TIME, Aug. 19). Critics mentioned Brouwer and Hogarth, acclaimed David Blythe as a first-rate U. S. genre painter.