Horace Pippin (American, 1888-1946) , Sunday Morning Breakfast, 1943. Oil on fabric, 16” x 20” Saint Louis Art Museum Collection.
Self-taught artist Horace Pippin (1888 -1946) occupies a unique space in art history, resonating with both American folk art traditions and the early-mid century modernism of artists like Charles Sheeler and Jacob Lawrence. Whether reimagining historical events, as in “John Brown Going to his Hanging” or picturing less dramatic domestic scenes of African-American life, Pippin’s work reflects a sophisticated balance between abstract design and simplified but evocative storytelling.
African-American, Pippin was born in West Chester Pennsylvania, but grew up in Goshen, New York. During WWI, he served in a predominantly black battalion, nicknamed the “Harlem Hellfighters” for its bravery. The longest serving U.S. regiment on the war's frontlines, the “Hellfighters” held their ground against enemy fire almost continuously from mid-July until the end of the war. Pippin began painting in the early 1920s, as a way of rehabilitating his badly injured arm which had been shot by a German sniper. Over the next decade, Pippin would devote himself more and more to his art, and by the late 1930s was gaining increased recognition for his work. His made his public debut with a painting in a traveling exhibition put on by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. This honor was followed by solo shows in Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco. From 1940 on, his work was being acquired for the Barnes Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1947, the year after his death, Pippin became the first African American artist to have a monograph written about his work, and the New York Times eulogized him as the ”most important negro painter in history.”
This intimate painting, done in oil on fabric, depicts a scene drawn from the artist’s warm childhood memories. Two children, dressed in their Sunday whites, sit at a central table, looking up and eagerly awaiting their breakfast. Their seated father looks on from the left, while their mother in a patterned kerchief and lively checkered apron brings a hot plate to the table. Behind her the stove glows hot orange, and a kettle whistles steam into the air. Pared down as the picture may be, we can nevertheless imagine what it would be like to be there in that kitchen on that Sunday morning: the sound of the kettle, the heat of the stove, the hard wood of the chairs, and the smell of breakfast.