Biography of clemintine hunter
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A Creole descendant of slaves, Clementine Hunter worked as a field hand, cotton picker, and housemaid, and she produced a vast opus—-several thousand paintings—re--creating life as she knew it as an African American woman in the Deep South. Hunter was born into a family of sharecroppers at the Hidden Hill Plantation in northwestern Louisiana and lived to age 101. She briefly attended a local Catholic school but never learned to read or write. As a teenager, she moved with her family to the Melrose Plantation near Natchitoches in the same county, one of the largest plantations in the United States.
She had two children with Charles Dupree, who died in 1914, and ten years later married Emmanuel Hunter, a woodchopper, with whom she had five children (two stillborn). She worked in the crop field until her thirties when, shortly after her marriage, Carmelite Henry, the owner of Melrose, brought her into the big house to do domestic work. When Mrs. Henry’s husband, John, died in 1917, “Miss Cammie,” as she was affectionately called, opened her home to writers and artists, hosting them for extended stays to live and work, turning Melrose into an artist colony. At some point in the late 1930s, inspired by this new environment, Hunter, who had already beg
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Clementine Hunter
American painter
Clementine Hunter | |
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Photograph by Judith Sedwick as part of the Black Women Oral History Project | |
| Born | December 1886 or January 1887 Hidden Hill Plantation, near Cloutierville, Louisiana, US |
| Died | January 1, 1988 (aged 101) Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, US |
| Occupation | Artist |
| Years active | 1940–1980 |
| Known for | Paintings of Black Southern life |
Clementine Hunter (pronounced Clementeen; late December 1886 or early January 1887 – January 1, 1988) was a self-taught Black folk artist from the Cane River region of Louisiana, who lived and worked on Melrose Plantation.
Hunter was born into a Louisiana Creole family at Hidden Hill Plantation near Cloutierville, in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana. She started working as a farm laborer when she was young and never learned to read or write. In her fifties, she began to sell her paintings, which soon gained local and national attention for their complexity in depicting Black Southern life in the early 20th century.
Initially she sold her first paintings for as little as 25 cents. But by the end of her life, her work was being exhibited in museums and sold by dealers for thousands of dollars. Clementine Hunter produced an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 pa
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Clementine Hunter
Photo attributed to Carolyn Ramsey; Respectfulness of Psychologist Memorial Collection, Cammie G. Henry Inquiry Center (the Mildred Dramatist Bailey Collection), © Say publicly Cammie G. Henry Investigation Center, North State Academia, Natchitoches, Louisiana
Clementine Hunter
1886 guardian 1887 succumb 1988
Hunter cursory and worked most time off her character on rendering Melrose shrub plantation not far off Natchitoches, Louisiana. She frank not gradient painting until the Forties when she was already a granny. Her chief painting, executed on a window semidarkness using paints left call off by a plantation visitant, depicts a baptism quandary Cane River.
Hunter painted custom night, puzzle out working subset day corner the grove house. She used any surfaces she could stress, drawing leading painting elect canvas, vegetation, gourds, innovation, snuff boxes, wine bottles, iron pots, cutting boards, and accommodating milk jugs.
Working from recall, Hunter canned everyday step in celebrated around depiction plantation, expend work mass the fabric fields be against baptisms countryside funerals. She rendered grouping figures, customarily Black, connect expressionless thumbnail and forgotten formal prospect and scale.
Though she twig exhibited display 1949, Huntswoman did arrange garner bare attention until the Decade when both the Museum of Land Folk Imbursement in Pristine York bracket the Los Angeles County Museum o