Human Flower Project
“Hoosier Garden”
Someone wonderful recently returned from Santa Fe with a card bearing this image by Gustave Baumann (1881-1971). The German-born artist lived for a time in Brown County, Indiana, part of an artists colony there, before heading for the East Coast and, ultimately, Santa Fe.
Baumann was a master of the color woodcut, having trained in Germany. As a teenager he was already supporting the family in Chicago with his commercial work. A successful sale of his prints at the Art Institute enabled him to leave the city for Nashville, Indiana, where he produced “Hoosier Garden” about 1915.
For you non-Midwesterners, Brown County is famed for its beauty – especially in the autumn, when the woodsy roads are clogged with leaf gazers – and has for more than a century attracted artists from the great university town of Bloomington, just to the west.
We’ve seen other versions of this same woodcut, more highly colored, titled “Grandma Battin’s Garden.” (There’s one at the Indiana State Museum and another at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.)
What makes this a more generic “Hoosier Garden”? We’re not sure. Carol?
“Hoosier Garden” by Gustave Baumann, c. 1915
Comments
Dear Carol,
Thanks. And great to hear from you! Sounds like a gorgeous fall day there in Indiana. The Fine Arts Museum in SF has many, many works, by Baumann, including a fall scene titled “Harden Hollow.” That must be Brown County, too.
http://search.famsf.org:8080/search.shtml?keywords=baumann+gustave
Happy October!
This looks like a classic Brown County scene with a wood structure and even wooden shingles. The flowers look so familiar and comfortable, what I’d expect to find in a well-tended flower garden in Indiana. Morning glories, hollyhocks, black-eye Susans, daisies, and perhaps some of those orange flowers are marigolds? This hoosier girl really likes this print and feels like jumping in the car and joining the caravan down to Nashville to see the fall foliage and peek in all the little shops down there. Thanks for showing me this. Though I’ve been to the state museum, I somehow missed this artwork.