Jonas Bradford and the American Memory Painters

A green steam locomotive numbered A 193 pulls a tender and a boxcar past a yellow clapboard house on a bright day. Two men in green walk beside the track, a figure leans from the car door, a horse grazes next to a buggy across the road, and the general store advertises crocks and pans on a hand-lettered sign. Every board, window and shingle is ruled in with a patient hand, and the colours are kept clean and sweet: lemon yellow, mint green, pink and sky blue. It is signed Jonas Bradford, and it is the first American folk painting in our gallery.

A painter known through his pictures

Jonas Bradford is one of those American folk painters about whom the pictures say more than the records. No biography has been published; dealers and auction houses place him in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in the 1950s and 1960s, and the paintings bear this out. His subjects repeat: clapboard houses and general stores, picket fences, a horse and buggy on a dirt road, red barns in autumn, a schoolhouse, a lighthouse on a flat shore, and the small steam train passing through a village that is his most characteristic picture. The works are signed in a careful cursive on canvas, and a number carry dates in the 1970s, so his activity may have run later than the trade assumes. What we know is on his artist page.

The memory painters

Bradford paints in the tradition that Grandma Moses made famous: the memory painter who records the village of his childhood, before the highway and the chain store, with a clarity that owes nothing to art school. Anna Mary Robertson Moses took up painting in her late seventies and was shown in New York from 1940; in the decades that followed, self-taught painters across the north-eastern states, Pennsylvania among them, found a public for the same affectionate inventory of barns, trains, sleighs and country stores. The pictures were sold through gift shops, local galleries and country auctions, which is why so many of these painters, Bradford included, left no paper trail.

Why collectors look for the trains

Among folk subjects the steam train is the one people ask for. It fixes a date, it gives a village picture a centre and a direction, and it carries the whole mythology of small-town America in one object. Bradford’s trains are drawn with the same ruler-straight care as his houses, and the locomotive here, green with a red cowcatcher and its number on the cab, is painted with evident pleasure. Prices for his work in the American trade are modest and vary with size and subject; a signed train of 50 × 61 cm on canvas, in good condition and in a period frame, is the picture of his that collectors want.

At Aurora & Athena

Steam Train through a Country Town, c. 1960s, oil on canvas, 50 × 61 cm, in a gilt and brown wooden frame with a cream slip (50 × 74 cm), signed at the lower right, is in our gallery at 1,200 €. The price is final, with no buyer’s premium; Buy now reserves the work for 48 hours while you pay by bank transfer or card, and the page shows the shipping estimate for your address. The painting can be seen in Barcelona by appointment. Photographs of the canvas, the frame and the signature are on the work’s page.