MOUNT VERNON — It’s a shame that today many creative people aren’t much encouraged by their home towns.
Such people all too often go off to big cities, taking their talents with them. Life is a little paler in the towns they left behind.
It wasn’t always that way. Consider the case of Daniel McDowell, a local artist who lived in Mount Vernon from the 1830s until his death in 1884. Originally from Franklin County, Pennsylvania, McDowell was settled in Mount Vernon by the time he was in his 20s. He married Patience Elliott, a local-born girl, on Dec. 26, 1833, and soon they began filling their home with children.
In all likelihood, McDowell had filled his house with furniture before that, for the earliest surviving records describe him as a chair maker, and later a cabinet maker. Yet perhaps he was already honing his skills as a painter early on, adding painted images to some of his furniture, which is how some of his work survives.
By the 1880 census, a picture of a remarkable family emerges. Daniel describes himself as an “artist in oil painting,” his son John, 39, as a “carver in wood,” his son Dan, 38, as a “wood turner,” and his daughter Mary, 29, also as an “artist in oil painting.”
They all lived in the same house. It’s just the sort of thing a town ought to have: a family dedicated to art, because art — whether in its most practical form as furniture, or something more formal — is one of those things that makes us human. We need it.
What became of the later McDowells, I do not know. But Daniel Sr. had a number of works that survived into modern times.
One of those was a humble but pleasing still life painting of a few slices of ripe watermelon, laid out on a billowing white tablecloth. The work is signed by McDowell, who added “Mount Vernon, O.” after his name.
The painting is particularly fascinating to folk art fans because it demonstrates two very different painting approaches in the same work: the watermelon slices are stylized, more flat and pattern-like than realistic, yet the billows of the tablecloth show that McDowell was highly skilled at realistic three-dimensional shading.
This was no amateur painter. Rather, he seems to be demonstrating his range.
Internet sources about artwork values are notoriously vague, but one estimate placed McDowell’s painting in the $30,000 to $40,000 range when it was auctioned by Sotheby’s a few years back.
Another source had an oddly specific estimate saying the painting probably sold for “42%” of its estimated value. This would suggest that a collector picked it up at something like $12,000 to $16,000.
Still, that’s pretty amazing for a small-town painter who likely never saw that much money in his entire life.
