Jonas Bradford

Jonas Bradford is one of those American folk painters known almost entirely through the pictures themselves. Dealers and auction houses place him in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s and 1960s, and his paintings bear this out: clapboard houses and general stores with hand-lettered signs, white picket fences, a horse and buggy on a dirt road, a small steam train passing through a village, red barns in autumn, lighthouses on a flat shore. The colours are bright and clean, the drawing deliberately plain, every board of a house ruled in, in the manner of the memory painters who followed Grandma Moses.

Little is documented about his life, and no biography has been published. The works are signed in a careful cursive, usually on canvas, and a number carry dates in the 1970s, so his activity may have run later than the trade assumes. His paintings appear regularly at American auctions and in dealers’ stock, valued for exactly what they offer: an affectionate, unhurried picture of small-town America before the highway.