Clementine Hunter: Her Life and Art

10. New Year’s Day, 1988

114 New Year’s Day, 1988 To every thing there is a season . . . A time to be born, and a time to die . . . —Ecclesiastes 3:1–2 She had to create art from a background that art was not part of. She found her self-expression and maintained it. —John Bullard, director emeritus of the New Orleans Museum of Art clementine hunter died at 2:10 in the afternoon on Saturday, January 1, 1988. She was unable to eat and suffering from dehydration on Wednesday, December 29, when her daughter Jackie (Mary) took her to Natchitoches Parish Hospital. Lottie Campbell, the charge nurse, listed the cause of death for the 101-year-old artist as simply “old age.”1 Eleanor Worsley, MD, her doctor for many years, whom she always called the “Lady Doctor,” was at her bedside. Edward Ward, who as a 6-year-old child had been among the first to see the African House Murals, was also at Hunter’s bedside. Her last word was water, he said. “She asked in a low, whispered voice for water.”2 Word of Hunter’s death spread rapidly across the Cane River Country and beyond. By Sunday people around the world learned of the artist’s passing. Mildred Bailey and Tom Whitehead were traveling in Kenya, Africa, when they read the report in the International Herald Tribune. Reporters in many languages retold the story of the domestic servant from rural Louisiana who became a famous artist. Hunter was the granddaughter of an enslaved woman, but many news reports, including those in local newspapers, mistakenly referred to Hunter as the “daughter of slaves.” chapter 10 115 New Year’s Day, 1988 Ann Brittain visited the artist several days before Thanksgiving in 1987. Hunter was weak, but she continued to paint. Brittain bought what she felt sure was Hunter’s last picture, a bouquet of zinnias. “They [the flowers] are very bright—yellow, blue, red. It’s bright,” she told a newspaper reporter.3 Brittain ’s picture may not have been Hunter’s last. Edward Ward called on Hunter in December at her home a few days before she was hospitalized for the last time. He too bought a painting, a washday scene, that he was certain was the artist’s last effort because the paint was not yet dry. Fig. 30. Zinnias. Ann Brittain thought this painting she bought a few weeks before the artist died might have been Hunter’s last picture. As it turned out, it could have been Hunter’s penultimate work, but it was not her final painting. ann and jack brittain & children. 116 Clementine Hunter No one doubts the artist painted almost every day from her first attempt in the late 1930s until just a few days before her death. She once told a reporter for the Dallas Morning News: “I just paint what comes in my mind, I don’t know if it’s good or bad; I just paint.”4 And paint she did. No one will ever produce a catalogue raisonné; it would be impossible. Hunter painted on hundreds of objects and created thousands of paintings on boards, paper, cardboard, and canvas. No accurate count exists, and it never will. More than five thousand paintings and objects originated from the hand of Clementine Hunter. The recitation of the Holy Rosary took place at 8 p.m., January 4, at the Winnfield Funeral Home in Natchitoches. At the wake Hunter’s body lay in the casket she had purchased several years earlier with money she earned from selling her art. About the purchase of her casket she proudly proclaimed: “I bought my own casket . . . I went and picked out what I want. It’s a nice one.”5 Flowers surrounded the bier at the wake, but there were none of her favorite Fig. 31. Washday. Possibly Hunter’s last picture. Ed Ward bought it from the artist a few days before she was hospitalized for the last time. ed ward. 117 New Year’s Day, 1988 zinnias. Zinnias are a summer flower, and Hunter died during an especially cold period of winter. More than two hundred of Hunter’s friends and family came for her funeral mass at the historic St. Augustine Catholic Church on Isle Brevelle. Cars filled the church parking lot and lined the roadside along the Cane River. A television news truck with a giant satellite dish beamed the event back to WBRZ-TV in Baton Rouge. All of this was...