Life Of An Itinerant Artist/Julius Sloan

The Farm Of Seymour Sloan by Junius Sloan, courtesy of the Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University

LIFE OF AN ITINERANT PAINTER/Junius Sloan

In the 19th century, the cities of the American Northeast were filled with artists. Some of them led successful careers; others struggled. Some of the ones who struggled left for other areas, the coastal South, western Pennsylvania and upstate New York. Some of them become known as itinerants, or traveling, painters. In the first half of the century, portraiture was the basic cash cow of American art and that is how traveling artists used their skills as they wandered the countryside. But just before the Civil War, landscape painting, inspired by the Hudson River artists, became a hot artistic commodity. Junius Sloan’s career falls between these two styles.

Junius was born in Ohio but his family moved to western Illinois, in 1853, following the growth of the railroads as they spread into the Midwest. In his youth, Junius seems to have developed a knack for art and sketched portraits of the family and neighbors. Completely self taught, Sloan spent his young adulthood traveling through rural New York, painting portraits for a few dollars, here and there, before heading out to Illinois to help his family establish their farm.

Afterwards, he temporarily settled in nearby Princeton, Illinois, before heading back out to paint, this time, back in Ohio. The family had maintained ties there and as he sought portrait work in the region of his boyhood, he made some discoveries. One was that he was smitten by the magic of the Hudson River School and that a market existed for landscape paintings. His other discovery was his love for his neighbor’s daughter, Sara Spencer, who became his wife. Sara’s father not only farmed, he taught penmanship. In their spare time, the Spencers promoted a form of penmanship that would be known as the Spencer script and would be as ubiquitous in the late 19th century as the Palmer Method would in the 20th century, now best known through the Coca-Cola logo. Through his struggles as an itinerant landscape painter, Junius would find that his wife’s classes in penmanship would keep the financial wolf away from the door, as he continually attempted to sell his work and services.

Junius spent some of his itinerant life painting areas near his father’s farm in western Illinois and back in his childhood stomping grounds in Ohio, but it was the lure of the Hudson River valley and the well trod paths of the Hudson River artists where he painted many of his landscapes. Over and over, he pulled his family back to New York and up into the Adirondacks, but from the view of history, those lovely paintings are just the artwork of another Hudson River artist. What makes Sloan special is the paintings he did around the family farm in Kewanee, Illinois. Here, in a number of watercolor and oil paintings, he captured the very early struggle of America as it blazed its path though the Midwest. In particular, he paints his father’s farm, buried behind a grove of trees and a cabin placed up against the corn. There is even cattle in the field. In front, clusters of prairie flowers and above it all, the big Illinois sky.

By the 1860’s, Julius and Sara had settled in Chicago. He still traveled and painted, primarily in New York. By then, it wasn’t just the Hudson River landscape calling but the minor successes in sales that he could claim in the City of New York. He also traveled the Midwest, including Wisconsin, in both Milwaukee and out in the Wisconsin Dells. Everywhere he traveled, he painted. By the end of the century, his parents had sold their property and moved to Redlands, California, now on the outskirts of LA. Julius was visiting there to paint when he fell off a ladder and died.

The first painters to portray any area are usually itinerant. Some are not as gifted as Sloan, but as an itinerant, he can be regarded as Illinois’ first major artist.

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