Vintage 1940s Joseph Pickett "Manchester Valley" Landscape Art Print

A 12" x 9" reproduction of Joseph Pickett Manchester Valley as a part of a late 1940s collection of the "World's Great Paintings" with title and commentary on reverse and in description below.

Joseph Pickett (American School 1848-1918) of New Hope, Pa., was one of the best of our American Sunday painters, or, if you prefer, American primitives.

Handsome in mien and in manner, he reminded those who knew him of the traditional Kentucky colonel. For many years he operated concessions-shooting galleries, cane racks and the like-at nearby fairs and carnivals, where it is said he decorated the galleries with landscapes, and the racks in "good old circus blue with gay curlicues." Then in his middle forties he married a "pink and pretty girl" and opened a little general store in New Hope.

It was in the back room of this store on Mechanic Street that he painted most of his pictures, including Manchester Valley, working painstakingly on each canvas until he was satisfied he could give no more to it. After his death his paintings were auctioned and his widow bought them in at a dollar apiece. Manchester Valley she gave to the New Hope High School where it hung for some years. Today it may be seen in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is an extraordinarily fresh and intriguing picture, with its vibrant colors, its compositional flow and counter-flow, its component forms at once static and in endless motion, as in our dreams and memories. One can see a familiar landscape as if it were for the first time after looking at Pickett's Manchester Valley.

EDWIN SEAVER