Home from the Harvest
Adam Emory Albright achieved critical acclaim and financial success by painting landscapes of children frolicking in bucolic outdoor settings. He grew up in a poor Midwestern farming family, and though he had artistic aspirations as a child, financial circumstances often forced him to drop out of school to work as a cowherd or at other labor-intensive jobs. Yet art flowed through his veins from birth, so much that once he quipped he did not recall a time when he was not drawing something. Determined to become an artist, Albright left home to study at the University of Kansas, and later at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, the precursor to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Desirous to expand his artistic outlook beyond Chicago, he moved to the East Coast and in 1883 took classes with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art. There he won a fellowship at the Academy and improved his ability in figure drawing. He was advised by his teachers to go to Europe to refine his skills even more, so from 1887-1888, he studied in Munich and Paris. Thereafter, Albright returned to Illinois, first in Edison Park, later in the picturesque area of Hubbard Woods. At age sixty-two, he took up residence in Warrenville, Illinois, where along with twin sons Ivan and Malvin (one a painter, the other a sculptor) he converted a former Methodist Church into an art studio, operating there the Albright Gallery of Painting and Sculpture for nearly thirty years.
In Return from the Harvest, Albright painted one of his favorite subjects, children. But rather than his usual depiction of showing them at leisure, the children slowly trudge home after a long day of toiling in the fields. Their chaperone is grandmother, and she and the eldest child bear large rucksacks of the harvest on their backs. The younger children hold baskets full of their gathered labor.
The artist selected a horizontal format to emphasize their progressive gait and journey home, and an implied repetition of their routine. Albright skillfully paints the children and grandmother in a duality of reality and idealization; the children are barefoot, suggesting an innocence, yet on the same hand, he hints at their rugged rural life tinged with poverty. Typical for Albright are the generic faces, imparting few details of physiognomy. Albright often used as models his twin sons or the local children of the town in which he was living. The year this work was painted--1914, Albright summered in Pennsylvania, visiting the Blue Ridge, Appalachia and particularly the Juniata county areas. His sons would have been seventeen years old, so more likely the figures in his charming work depict the residents of Pennsylvania as does the landscape. The Union League Club owns another work by Adam Albright, Log in the River as well as a work by his son Ivan Albright, Knees of Cypress.
