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Christmas Morning, Breakfast 

Although he was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1888, Horace Pippin grew up in Goshen, New York, where he attended school. At an early age, he loved to sketch pictures of words he had to spell, such as dog or stove, a habit not enamored by his teachers. By age 10 for one of his drawings, he won a mail-order prize of Crayola crayons and a box of watercolors. In his teens, he received an offer for art lessons which he declined, seeking work as a hotel porter to help his ailing mother. Following her death, Pippin moved to New Jersey, where a furniture moving company employed him. Later he worked as an iron molder in a foundry. Following the declaration of war against Germany, he enlisted in the US Army in 1917.

Pippin served in the 3rd Battalion of the 3269th Infantry Regiment, the famous Harlem Hell Fighters, a predominantly black unit known for bravery in battle and recipient of the French Croix de Guerre. Gravely wounded by a German sniper, his shoulder and right painting arm partially paralyzed, he returned home, emotionally, and physically scarred, leaving behind a series of drawings he had completed at the front lines. In his later years, he was awarded the Purple Heart for his combat injuries.

In 1920, he married Jennie Featherstone Wade Giles, a widow with a six-year-old son, and moved to his wife's home in West Chester, Pennsylvania. Ten years passed before he returned to drawing, initially using a white-hot poker on wood panels. Despite his physical disability and being entirely self-taught as an artist, he turned to oil painting. Supporting his right wrist with his left hand, he completed his first painting The Ending of the War: Starting Home, an impressive effort of three years duration and a hundred coats of paint! He was now 42 years of age.

Christmas Morning, Breakfast is typical of Pippin’s artistic style - a nonacademic, linear technique characterized by a powerful sense of design and expressive use of color. The horizontal rugs interface with strong vertical lines of the floor and colored columns of carpeting. The Christmas tree stands balanced with the oven’s stovepipe. Central to the painting a small boy, smartly dressed, awaits a plate of pancakes served presumably by his mother. Despite the room’s plainness and cracked wall plaster just left of the stove, the presents beneath the decorated tree announce this day as special.

Pippin painted a wide range of subjects, from African American genre scenes, portraits, and biblical scenes to politically historical paintings such as John Brown Going to His Hanging and allegories such as Prejudice. Pippin’s rise to fame paralleled the folk art revival of the 1930s. He attracted the attention of N. C. Wyeth and Christian Brinton, who arranged to have his first solo exhibition at the West Chester Community Center in 1937. He gained national attention in 1938 when four of his paintings were highlighted in the traveling exhibition Masters of Popular Painting organized by the Museum of Modern Art. On July 6, 1946, he died following a stroke.

Pippin’s works are held in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

Christmas Morning, Breakfast

1945

Horace Pippin

Art for Hearts