Joseph Pickett.
(1848-1918, Pennsylvania).
Brenton Reef Lightship, #39.
c. 1897-1914.
Signed lower right 'Jos Pickett.'
House paint with sand on tarpaper with paperboard backing.
Good antique condition with backing losses.
Surface soiling, buckling, and hairline craquelure throughout.
Areas of inpainting, predominantly to waves with largest below ship's name.
Painting is 22"w x 13"h.
Frame is 27.5"w x 18.75"h.
Prov: Collection of Harry Worthington.
1874-1951), New Hope, PA.
Collection of Leonardo L. Beans, Trenton, NJ.
Collection of Dr. Abbey, Pennington, NJ.
Reacquired by Leonardo L. Beans, 1976.
Private Collection, Trenton, NJ.
Rago Auction, Fine Art, Lambertville, NJ, September 2007, Lot 23.
Collection of Ira Spanierman.
1929-2019), Spanierman Gallery, New York, NY.
Private Collection, Pennsylvania.
Rago Auction, Spanierman Sale, Day 2, Lambertville, NJ, April 29, 2021, Lot 507.
The Mike Dale Collection.
Est. $15,000-$25,000.
Ship: $65

Joseph Pickett was born in New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1848.His father, Edward Pickett, moved to New Hope in 1840 to repair the locks on one of the canals there. Afterward he stayed on to build boats. Pickett had no formal education, learning carpentry and shipbuilding from his father, but instead he worked in small traveling carnivals and fairs, running concessions such as knife boards and shooting galleries. Pickett opened a shooting gallery of his own at Neshaminy Falls Grove, a well-known amusement park.Each winter he would return home to New Hope. He gave up his nomadic lifestyle in 1893, at age 45, when he married his wife, Emily, settled in New Hope, and opened a general store on Mechanic Street. In 1912 the Picketts bought an even larger store on Bridge Street onto which Pickett constructed living quarters. His earliest artistic endeavors were backdrops for his carnival concessions, although none have survived.He also painted a mural of a maple tree on the storefront of 'Pickett,' his general store.

Pickett is believed to have begun his painting career around the turn of the century while still at his Mechanic Street store, at first using materials available to him in his store such as house paint, muslin, tarpaper, and simple brushes. This painting, Brenton Reef Lightship #39, is house paint with sand on tarpaper. In slack times when Pickett was not serving as grocer or butcher, he would retreat to a back room at the store and paint. Friends and relatives recalled that Pickett worked on dozens of these smaller early paintings at once, many dealing with the history of New Hope back to revolutionary days when the town was known as Coryell's Ferry.

Pickett mixed sand, shells, and other gritty substances in his house paint to give it texture. The painting offered here appears to have sand mixed with the paint in the sky section. Pickett would work for months on each painting, building up layers of paint in certain areas to give the works a three-dimensional look.In the painting offered here, the paint buildup is especially noticeable in the sails of the sailboat at top left and in the wave areas in the foreground.Pickett signed these early works 'Jos Pickett,' which is also the case for the painting offered here. For later works (1914-1918) Pickett employed oils, canvas and better quality artist's materials.

The Brenton Reef Lightship #39 would have been a subject of great interest to Pickett, given his carpentry and shipbuilding background. This 119-foot long, 387-ton wooden vessel was essentially a mobile, floating lighthouse. The lightship was anchored about two miles offshore so that vessels approaching the East Passage of Narragansett Bay could follow a deep channel course between Beavertail Point and the anchored lightship, avoiding the dangerous rocks of Brenton Reef. Beams from the ship's two massive light towers could be seen for up to 12 miles at night. This lightship served at Brenton Reef from 1897 until 1935, when it was replaced by a steel-hulled vessel that served into the 1960s.

Harry Worthington, at the top of this painting's provenance chain, was a prominent businessman in New Hope at the time of Joseph Pickett's death. During his lifetime, Worthington operated a successful farm and feed mill, helped bring telephone lines to farmers in Solesbury township, served as a director and charter member of the Solesbury National Bank, was president and member of the New Hope Borough Council, and was supervisor of roads for Solesbury township. When Pickett died in 1918, Worthington purchased the general store building on Bridge Street from Pickett's widow, Emily, and converted it to a garage.

Fast forward seven years to 1925. By this time, Worthington had turned over the day-to-day operation of the garage to his two eldest sons, Alvin and William, and it became known as the Worthington Brothers Garage.Lloyd Ney, a young upstate painter who had studied in Paris, moved to New Hope in that year. Ney visited the Worthington Brothers Garage and saw two canvases standing against a wall, obviously the work of an untrained naïve artist. Ney liked the paintings, and purchased the works through a middleman, Pop Johnson, the proprietor of the Logan Inn, for the sum of $15. Unbeknownst to Ney, Pop Johnson gave the Worthington Brothers $7.50 for the paintings and pocketed $7.50 for himself. Ney kept the paintings for a few months but then traded them to R. Moore Price, a local art dealer, for $50 worth of frames. Price held onto the two paintings until 1931. The two Pickett paintings purchased from Worthington Brothers Garage in 1925 were Washington Under the Council Tree and Coryell's Ferry 1776. Those two paintings are now in the permanent collections of the Newark Museum, Newark, NJ, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, respectively.

How did Harry Worthington acquire these paintings by Joseph Pickett? It is possible that a few of Pickett's paintings were used as decoration in the general store and were included when Worthington purchased the building. A more likely explanation is that, when Pickett's widow held an auction of her husband's paintings after his death, Worthington purchased some of the works (said to have sold for $1 each) as a way of supporting the widow. New Hope was a small town and Worthington would have known both of the Picketts personally.Worthington was also a Presbyterian and Kiwanian and was known to have a charitable disposition.

Another important link in the provenance of this painting is Ira Spanierman (1929-2019), who cultivated a reputation as one of the country's preeminent experts in 19th and early 20th century American Art. His Spanierman Gallery was known and trusted by institutions and collectors worldwide. He supported American art scholarship, undertaking the catalogue raisonnes of John Twachtman, Theodore Robinson, and Willard Metcalf, and publishing the comprehensive record of the work of Winslow Homer. His fine 'eye' was not limited to American works. Spanierman bought a dirt-encrusted Old Masters painting for $325 at a Sotheby Park-Bernet auction in 1968. In 2007, that same painting, by then authenticated and identified as Portrait of Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of Urbino by Raphael, sold at Christie's London for $37,277,500.

Joseph Pickett's work never achieved public acclaim in his lifetime. Curator Holger Cahill encountered Pickett's work in New Hope, and was instrumental in its inclusion in the first major museum surveys of American Folk Art at the Newark Museum in 1930, American Primitives, and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932, American Folk Art: The Art of the Common Man in America, 1750–1900, and again in 1938, Masters of Popular Painting.