Sep 19, 2024 - Sale 2678

Sale 2678 - Lot 68

Unsold
Estimate: $ 10,000 - $ 15,000
PALMER HAYDEN (1890-1973)
Bus Stop.

Watercolor on wove paper, circa 1935. 470x315 mm; 18x12⅜ inches. Signed lower left.

Provenance
Private collection, Washington, D.C.
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Additional Details

Harlem Renaissance artist Palmer Hayden became well known for his depictions of African American daily life in New York City, as in the present watercolor, and in the rural South.

Born Peyton Cole Hedgeman in Widewater, Virginia, Palmer Hayden moved to Washington, D.C. as a teenager to pursue an artistic career. Despite being faced with prejudice and racism in the field, the young artist persisted, often taking menial odd jobs to survive while studying drawing and painting in his spare time. Upon joining the United States Army in 1911, Hedgeman adopted the name Palmer C. Hayden as a result of a clerical error.

After serving in the Philippines and at West Point, Hayden moved to Greenwich Village, New York and became active in the small artist community there. Hayden was one of the first recipients of the William E. Harmon Foundation award in 1926 which essentially launched his career. With the prize money and funding from his supporters, Hayden was able to spend five years in France, alongside other émigré artists Henry Ossawa Tanner and Hale Woodruff. He became familiar with philosopher Alain Locke, author of The New Negro (1925), and his collection of indigenous African Art, and was also influenced artistically by the Louvre's collection of modern art.

Hayden went to work for the United States Treasury Art Project and the Works Progress Administration after he returned to New York in 1932, and much of his work from this time focused on capturing the vitality of daily life in Harlem. One of his most famous paintings, the circa 1937 oil on canvas The Janitor Who Paints, in the collection of the Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (accession number 1967.57.28), shows his friend artist Cloyd Boykin, who worked as a janitor, at the easel. Hayden created the painting to shed light on his own dichotomous situation as a successful artist forced to support himself financially, like many African Americans, by taking only the low paying jobs available to him.