But I didn’t tell Emily what I was thinking, and she didn’t tell me what she was thinking. Instead, I pointed out the beauty of the trees, although it was her landscape and she didn’t need me to point anything out to her.
We talked and drove around, the day unspooling in conversation and the deep greens of the countryside, the sounds of birdsong, and a breeze stirring the leaves on the trees. I was entirely present, and yet at the end of the day I recalled almost nothing, which is how I imagine life goes.
For a while you remember the taste of the apple, but then you just remember that it was sweet.
USDA WATERCOLOUR ARTISTS
Because of the great number of apple varieties in America in the late nineteenth century, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) decided to create a Division of Pomology to collect and disseminate information about apples to fruit growers. The division opened on July 1, 1866, under the stewardship of the USDA’s first agricultural commissioner, the rather ironically named Isaac Newton, who was a former dairy farmer from Pennsylvania known for his successful farming practices. Newton was appointed commissioner in 1862 by President Abraham Lincoln, who himself had a farming background, albeit a modest one. The Newtons and the Lincolns knew one another. The butter eaten at the White House was supplied every week by Isaac Newton’s dairy farm, and he and his family had a close and ongoing relationship with the president.
Newton was sixty-six when he became agricultural commissioner, and his appointment was greeted with ridicule because his friendship with Lincoln was no secret in Washington. His age and lack of experience were questioned by many critics, as was his practice of hiring family members. (He hired one of his sons to run an experimental farm, and twice appointed a nephew to be chief clerk of the USDA.) In a report at the Fruit Growers’ Convention in California, he was called a “great ponderous barnacle,”1 and was laughed at when he issued his first report without binding it. (The loose-leaf pages were promptly used all over Washington grocery stores as wrapping paper for produce.)2
But Newton persisted with his plans for collecting and disseminating agricultural information.3 He believed that “the best farmer is always the most intelligent man, and a community of knowledge is one of the strongest ties that can bind and bless society.”4
When the Division of Pomology began, it was overwhelmed with requests from farmers to identify apple trees on their property, and so Newton decided to create an illustrative library to help with this task. He hired over fifty watercolour artists to produce accurate paintings of all American fruit. The artists began working in 1887, and when the effort was brought to a close in 1940, they had produced an astonishing 7,584 detailed paintings of different varieties of fruit and nuts, including 3,807 paintings of apples.
My grandfather did some botanical illustration for a time, painting examples of fruit and vegetables for seed catalogues in Britain. He was a lifelong artist, having studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1920s and, because he had a family to support, moving into commercial art in the early heady days of advertising, before the camera replaced the artist.
Seed catalogues had regard for the artistic rendering, rather than the realistic reproduction. This is still true today. At least half the seed packets I bought last year for my garden had a hand-painted illustration on the front. This must be less a mere tradition than a tried-and-tested marketing strategy. There is something in the hand of the artist that makes a painting of a fruit or vegetable more appealing to a customer than a photograph. Perhaps it’s because a photograph is so absolutely what it is—there are no subtleties. And to have a photograph of a carrot on a seed packet would be offering a promise that the carrots grown from those seeds would look exactly like the picture. A watercolour or a coloured pencil drawing of a carrot, on the other hand, tells you that this is an approximation of what the carrot you grow will look like. There are no promises made. This is what the artist thinks the carrot you grow might resemble.
The USDA illustrations of apples were done by twenty-one artists, nine of whom were women. Because I am tracing the history of the White Winter Pearmain, I will focus on the artists who painted examples of this particular variety. These artists considered each apple carefully before painting it, and perhaps there is something to be learned from their studies. Also, the USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection belongs to the golden age of the apple in North America, and it’s worth looking at with that in mind. The renderings are beautiful, and while the artists are lost to history, as are many of the apples they painted, I want to honour their act of cataloguing the fruit and show a time in recent history when art and science worked side by side and were equals.
Bertha Heiges painted the first example of the White Winter Pearmain for the USDA, in 1898. Like all the watercolours, this one has two paintings of the apple on a single sheet of paper. In one painting the apple is shown whole, and in the second, directly below the first, it’s displayed in cross-section so that the calyx, flesh and seeds may be seen.
Bertha Heiges’s Pearmain is almost perfectly round in the illustration at the top of the page. It is yellow and freckled with brown spots on the left side, and covered with an orangey blush on the right. In the cross-section, the flesh is white and there are two seeds tucked together in the right-hand ovary near the core.5 According to Heiges’s handwritten note at the bottom of the picture, this particular apple was painted on March 2, 1898, and is from Coeur d’Alene in Idaho.
Bertha Heiges was born in Pennsylvania on June 29, 1866, to Samuel and Elizabeth Heiges. She was the second of their seven children. Her father was a botany professor, and in 1895 he became the chief pomologist for the USDA.6 We can assume that this is how Bertha ended up painting apples for the Division of Pomology, as in 1895 she is also employed with the USDA as an “expert,”7 making $600 a year. Two years later she is listed as a “clerk”8 and is earning $1,000 a year—$200 less than another USDA watercolour artist, Deborah Passmore. That salary in 1897 is roughly equivalent to $29,000 today. (Passmore was the most highly regarded of the USDA artists, which accounts for the discrepancy.)
Bertha was college-educated and worked as an artist for the USDA until 1905, when she married Alexander Halstead Caldwell. They were married on October 18 in Virginia, where Bertha’s father was now managing the Virginia State Test Farm for the USDA. According to the Washington Post, “The parlor [where the wedding took place] was beautifully decorated with autumn leaves, ferns, and shrubbery.” Members of both families were present, indicating that the marriage was acceptable to all concerned. And Bertha’s sister, Grace, played the piano— first Wagner’s Lohengrin and later Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.9
Bertha Heiges gave up her work with the Division of Pomology after her marriage. She and Alexander lived in Virginia before settling in San Diego for the duration of their lives. They were relatively old when they married—Bertha was thirty-nine, and Alexander forty-eight—so they did not have any children. Bertha didn’t seek any other employment. She is listed on the federal census for 1910 and beyond as a “homemaker.” Alexander worked as a clerk. He died on June 30, 1940, the day after his wife’s birthday, at the age of eighty-three. Bertha lived on until 1956, when she died on May 26 at the age of eighty-nine.
These are the details of her life, the facts that are available through the public record. What is missing is her actual life. And so, I am left with a series of questions rather than any definitive answers.
Was she a committed artist? Did she delay marriage beyond her child-bearing years so she could give everything to her art? Did she continue to paint after she stopped working at the USDA? If so, where are her paintings?
Was her marriage happy? Was she expected to give up her employment and independence upon marrying? Did she want to?
What did Bertha and the other artists who worked for the USDA think about the ambitious project of creating a visual library of American fruit? Were they made to feel that it was important work? Did th
ey feel this? Sometimes a painting of theirs was the only illustration in existence of a particular fruit.10 Did this influence how they felt about what they were doing?
In the ten years Bertha Heiges worked as a watercolour artist for the USDA, she produced over six hundred paintings, each one signed in her spidery black hand in the bottom right corner of the image.11 This is approximately one painting per week, an impressive output given that watercolours are made by layering colour upon colour, and that each layer has to dry before the next one can be applied.
I remember being at my grandparents’ house when my grandfather was working on the seed catalogue. He painted upstairs in a small attic bedroom, at a drafting table under a window overlooking the back garden. He listened to the radio while he worked, BBC Radio 1, and he often recounted interesting things he had heard on various programs when he came down for supper at the end of the day.
When he was working on the seed catalogues, he would raid the fridge for specimens to draw or paint, much to the annoyance of my grandmother, who would watch the cabbage she had planned to use for supper disappear upstairs to become an artist’s model.
My grandfather, like many of the USDA artists, also had a private artistic practice. He painted oils and watercolours, and made drawings, all through his life. He lived into his early nineties, and I have an oil painting he made at eighty-six that is as good as anything he ever did. When driving in the car, he would frequently lurch to a stop because he had seen an interesting tree or view, and he would sometimes make a quick sketch before returning to paint what he’d found. As an artist, he never stopped being interested in life, and that made him, always, a fascinating person to be around, because he lived in the present and was fully engaged with it.
Joanne was also an accomplished artist, in addition to being a writer. In the early days of our friendship, I asked her to teach me how to draw. We started with a plate of pears, because she said they were easy, given their pleasing shape. I don’t think I was particularly good at rendering them, but I do remember her telling me to draw them as though I were touching their skin, and to try to work without lifting the pencil from the paper.
Years later, for a birthday, Joanne painted me a watercolour of a large yellow apple on a grey background—oddly enough, not unlike the White Winter Pearmain I ate outside the deserted cabin that day. Inside the card, she had glued fortunes from the cookies we used to get at the end of our weekly dinners at a local Cambodian restaurant.
You are next in line for promotion in your firm.
You will have no problems in your home.
Count to ten first. Then you’ll know the urgency is real.
Amanda Almira Newton was born in 1860 and began painting fruit for the USDA in 1896, working for them until 1928, a full thirty-two years that took her from thirty-six to sixty-eight—an entire working lifetime. She was the granddaughter of Isaac Newton, the first agricultural commissioner of the USDA, although he died while she was still a child, so he cannot be charged with nepotism regarding her hire.
Amanda Newton painted over twelve hundred watercolours for the Division of Pomology, mostly of apples. She depicted the White Winter Pearmain multiple times, showing it in its unripe state, when fully ripe and just picked, and also after a few months of having been stored. Most of the exemplars were from California, although there was one painting of a ripe White Winter Pearmain from Idaho in which the apple is covered in spots and has patches of grey mould over parts of the skin.12
Clearly interested in how fruit changed and ripened with storage, Amanda Newton also created wax models of apples to show this evolution, and she exhibited these models at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition and at the World’s Fair in St. Louis in 1904. Another USDA illustrator, Royal Charles Steadman, made and exhibited wax models as well, and it would seem that he and Amanda Newton had a friendship of sorts, as she commissioned him to paint a portrait of her grandfather.
Amanda Newton never married. She owned her own home in Washington, sometimes taking in a boarder, and listed herself as “head of household” and “artist” on the federal census of 1920.
She died in 1943, at the age of eighty-three.
In the one photo I could find of Ellen Isham Schutt, she is wearing a hat festooned with flowers across the brim. Her dark hair is piled up and she is frowning against the sun. She looks, if not exactly formidable, certainly very capable and confident. This is a woman who had a massive concrete house built on her father’s land in Virginia and named it Ellenwood.13 She was also the recording secretary for the Virginia chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. She married twice and had no children. Her first marriage lasted only three years; her second was to a first cousin.
Schutt was born on April 15, 1873, in Oak Grove, Virginia. She worked for the USDA for ten years, between 1904 and 1914, and produced over seven hundred watercolours for them. Like Royal Charles Steadman and Amanda Newton, she made models out of wax to show the effects of storage on various types of fruit.
In 1911, Schutt was commissioned by the University of California to make a series of paintings that demonstrated how disease and long-term storage altered and marked apples. Over four years, she painted 286 of these watercolours of damaged fruit.14 (Schutt painted the White Winter Pearmain in 1906, well before she began her series of commissioned watercolours. The Pearmain that she illustrated was all yellow and covered with small dots; the apple was from a tree in Colorado.)
Like many of the other artists who worked for the USDA, Schutt was in her thirties when she did most of her paintings—arguably the prime of life, when her technical skills, not to mention her eyesight, might have been at their sharpest. She died in Falls Church, Virginia, in 1955, at the age of eighty-two. She was remembered for her “artistic skill, patriotism, and civic dedication.”15
When my grandfather was young and fresh out of art school, he spent a summer travelling around Britain, offering to repaint pub signs in exchange for food and lodging. In this way, he managed to spend months moving around the country on no money. Some of his repainted signs still hang outside of various country pubs to this day.
To be an artist is to be inventive—it’s one of the requirements of the job—and in many artists, this innovation extends to their own lives as well. My grandfather had many schemes for earning money from his art: pub signs, cutout model villages, beer coasters, cigarette cards, brochures. He always had a plan afoot, an enthusiasm to chase down. I realize now, as I get older, that this is not unlike my attachment to my projects, and my need to throw myself wholeheartedly into the future and my latest story idea.
My grandfather belonged to an elite group of artists in the advertising world. It was a time where the advertising poster was held in high regard, with the more famous illustrators signing theirs, acknowledging the human component of the advertisement, and blurring the lines between commerce and art. One of the most renowned poster artists of all time was the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
There were many poster artists in Britain in the 1930s, and my grandfather remembered rushing out into the streets to see the new work of artists he admired, as excited as if he were viewing paintings in a gallery. He himself painted posters for London Transport, travel ads for Southern Railway and recruiting posters for the army. At the London Transport Museum, you can buy a reproduction of one of his posters informing you to have correct change for the bus conductor. All of his original posters are now sought-after items, sold through auction houses and beyond the means of anyone in his family.16 He would have found that amusing, or appalling. I can’t decide which. Like a lot of artists, he struggled financially all his life, never fully recovering from the arrival of the camera into the commercial art world. He worked for himself after that, doing smaller, less public work for smaller, less public clients—those who still valued a hand-drawn or painted illustration over the glossy perfection of the photograph.
Deborah Griscom Passmore was the most highly regarded artist for the
Division of Pomology; she worked for the USDA for nineteen years and painted over fifteen hundred watercolours in that time. Her tenure ended only because she died of a heart attack in 1911, at the age of seventy.
Passmore was an artist whose reach extended beyond her paid botanical illustrative work. She had a private art studio in Washington and taught painting from there, and she produced hundreds of her own pieces outside of her employment. A friend remembers her as “a most inveterate sketcher [who] did literally hundreds of little bits of landscape in oil; when riding or walking she was everlastingly composing pictures.”17
Deborah Passmore was born on July 17, 1840, the fifth and final child of a father who was a farmer and a mother who worked as a teacher and a Quaker minister. Deborah’s mother died when she was small, and Deborah was raised by her eldest sister, Mary, and sent for her education to the boarding school where her mother had taught before she married. A spirited child, Deborah was interested in art right from the beginning; she even attempted to draw flowers using their own juices, which she got from chewing the flower and spitting out the liquid contained within to use as pigment.18
She studied art at the School of Design for Women and the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Philadelphia, and then spent a year in Europe looking at the great painters in the galleries there. Influenced by the English biologist and botanical illustrator Marianne North,19 Passmore painted a folio of the wildflowers of North America20 and was hired by the USDA in 1892.
Passmore lived an independent life, never marrying, and remained deeply immersed in the Quaker faith of her parents. She eventually owned her own home, where she lived with a succession of yellow cats and her vast collection of shells and coral.21
Deborah Passmore painted the White Winter Pearmain twice, once in 1908 and once the following year. The 1908 apple was very red, with almost no yellow on it at all, and was from California. The 1909 apple, from Idaho, was yellow with a deep red blush on the left-hand side. Both were beautifully luminous—Passmore was such a detailed painter that she often used a hundred watercolour washes on a single painting.22
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