Antique American impressionist oil painting titled, "Summer Shadows" by Orr Cleveland Fisher (1885 - 1974). Oil on board. Signed. Framed in an excellent Newcomb Macklin giltwood impressionist painting frame. Please see all images for condition. Size is measured and written on the back of the painting. The first size is the overall size, the second size is the image size. For detailed condition questions please text 617-835-2496.Artist Bio:Orr Cleveland Fisher : The Corn Parade WPA muralArt images copyright© of artist or assigneePreviousNextBiography from the Archives of askARTPhoto of Orr Cleveland FisherThe following, submitted April 2004, is from Donna L. Howard of Depoe Bay, Oregon. She is a niece of the artist.Born on a farm in south central Iowa, Orr Fisher had an interest in art that was kindled at an early age. From a biographic article he authored in 1930, I quote:"At an early age, yet in the primary department of a country school, I exhibited a talent for drawing by making pictures on my slate during the study period and on the blackboard at recesses and the noon hour. The barn doors, granary walls and every place on the old homestead where a smooth surface appeared was a temptation too strong to resist the markings of my pencil or chalk. Hence everything on the old farm was either decorated with comics or carved with knife in crude designs and initials. I use to draw with my finger in the plow furrow where the over-turned sod presented a smooth surface. On the way to school I would dig from the clay hills red and yellow soft rocks to color my pictures at school. This was before I knew what a crayola was.""I might put it this way everywhere I have gone I have drawn. I have drawn almost everything imaginable up to the modern art era except a salary."Orr's formal art education was limited to correspondence courses in drawing, cartooning, design and illustrating plus two periods of instruction at the Cumming School of Art, Des Moines, Iowa in 1913 and again in 1921. To quote the artist himself."They Ask Me "Did you Study Art?""Well, here it is I started from the ground up, and took my first course in art while in my 'teens a correspondence course in drawing and illustrating. At 21, I entered Drake University for my higher school education. While there, I drew cartoons for the Drake weekly; fired furnaces; washed dishes; waited on tables; made and sold fancy pillow covers; made signs and posters; debated; gave chalk-talks; illustrated the Drake Quax two years; flunked in Latin and German; quit school and went West."Got work on a ranch in Wyoming; organized a Sunday School; drove an eight-horse freight team with one line 90 miles across the desert; slept on the ground and in a covered wagon when 40 degrees below zero; heard the coyotes howl, rode a four-horse load of pine logs down the mountain behind a run-away team, was thrown off, tangled in the lines and drug over the rocks, but escaped with only bruises; fell through the ice riding a horse across a mountain stream, jumped to solid ice and escaped, but the horse chilled to death; bet Uncle Sam that I could live one year on a quarter section of land, and I won the bet; built a log cabin, hunted deer and elk and really ate bear meat."I started on the second correspondence course in drawing and illustrating. Then I quit the West and came back to Iowa, and worked for the Chicago Rock Island and Pacific railroad as electrical signalman; drew cartoons at night for the Signal Engineer magazine, illustrated the Signalman's Almanac; organized a Signalman's Union; got fired; quit the railroad; drew a cartoon of William Galloway, and he offered me a job. I then went to Waterloo and drew cartoons and illustrations for the company's advertising; fell in love and fell out again; resigned my job and entered art school; offered my job back, but declined the offer; one year in art school the second time; quit school and went West again to study and paint in Colorado."Came back to Iowa; went out West again and painted and sold pictures. I wrote the articles "Through America's Scenic Wonders by Auto" and "Lights and Shadows of the Auto Trail". I also wrote the articles over the pen name of "Fax Ritten", published in the Mount Ayr Record News; also author of the cartoons signed "Crip". I have drawn many religious cartoons; written religious articles and several sermons; painted 14 easel paintings for Uncle Sam; won state prizes and medals in oil painting, design and black and white; entered work in nine art competitions and executed two mural paintings for the United States Government."Yes, I have studied art for over 40 years. Some in Chicago, Ill., Woodstock and New York, N.Y., San Francisco, Calif., Colorado Springs and Denver, Colo., Salt Lake City, Utah, Omaha, Neb., and Des Moines. I have had no little experience in painting from nature. If you don't believe the above compendium, drop in and see for yourself what is probably the largest one-man show of original oil paintings in the state of Iowa."You will be welcome.Orr C. Fisher"(This newspaper clipping is estimated to have been written in the mid to late 1940's while Orr C. Fisher was living in Mt Ayr, Iowa. It was probably published in the Mt Ayr Record News The copy is punctuated as it was in the clipping with the exception of paragraphing and one spelling correction)As you can see above Orr attended Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa and drew cartoons for the Drake DELPHIC and in 1909 illustrated the college annual, QUAX. As a side line at this time, Mr. Fisher hand-painted sofa pillows for college students and had the privilege of working with J. N. "Ding" Darling, cartoonist for the Des Moines, Iowa REGISTER.Orr was an inventor as well as artist and cartoonist and obtained a US, Canadian and British patent on an automatic whistle for a locomotive. For a time he was a Signal Maintainer for the Chicago Rock Island Railroad, Allerton, Iowa and contributed articles and cartoons to the Signal Engineers Magazine and Signalmen's almanac.For a couple of years, Orr drove a six-horse freight wagon as an Overland Teamster between Rock Springs and Boulder, Wyoming.Another job which utilized his talents was drawing cartoons, illustrations and answering correspondence for the William Galloway Co., Waterloo, Iowa.During WPA days, Orr Fisher painted murals in US Post Offices in Mount Ayr and Forest City, Iowa. He also submitted suggestions for several other post offices but was not commissioned for any further work.Orr's paintings are national in scope, since he painted wherever he lived and wherever he traveled from New England to the Pacific Coast to the Grand Canyon to the Jackson Hole country and most areas in between. He exhibited in shows wherever he lived and usually joined the local art societies. He won prizes and ribbons all over the country. The last was for his portrait of J. N. "Ding" Darling which won a blue ribbon at a Society of Western Artists Show at Fashion Fair, Fresno, California. This painting has since been donated to The University Museums, Brunnier Gallery, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa by his niece, Donna L. Howard.He was a man of many interests and many talents but his first love was always painting with oils particularly with palette knife and much of his later work was done in this medium.He was living in Fresno, California at the time of his death. Before moving to California in the 1960's, he built a studio in Woodstock, New York and lived in that artist's colony for several years.Biography from the Archives of askARTPhoto of Orr Cleveland FisherRINGGOLD COUNTY’S CORN PARADEThe WPA and Orr Fisher’s Masterful Muralby Roy R. BehrensAmerican astronaut Peggy Whitson was born in south central Iowa, in Ringgold County, and attended high school in Mount Ayr, the county seat. She is that region’s claim to fame, although it should also be noted that the parents of Jackson Pollock, the Abstract Expressionist artist, also grew up in that county.My favorite feather in the cap of Ringgold County is a Depression-era WPA mural that hangs in the US Post Office in Mount Ayr. Created in 1941 by local artist Orr Cleveland Fisher (1885-1974), it is titled The Corn Parade. I have admired it for years, but, until recently, I had only seen reproductions.I drove down to Mount Ayr a few years ago, walked into the post office, and was delighted to see the mural, first hand in all its glory. It is installed in the lobby, above the postmaster’s office door. I photographed it from a low angle, without a ladder, which of course distorted the overall shape. But I was able to straighten it later and to restore its true proportion, using appropriate software.Older readers may already know about the WPA. It dates from the 1930s, during the Great Depression, when US President Franklin D. Roosevelt created government subsidy programs to stabilize the economy by hiring the unemployed to work on public projects. The acronym WPA stood for the Works Progress Administration, an agency that oversaw the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the Federal Theatre Project (FTP). the Federal Writers Project (FWP), and other arts-based programs.In Iowa, the PWAP regional director was Grant Wood. It was he who approved the artists who were commissioned by the government (at a salary of $26.50 to $42.50 per week) to create public murals, mostly for post office lobbies. As many as thirty-five were commissioned for Iowa buildings, including two by Orr Fisher (in Mount Ayr and Forest City).The majority of those in Iowa have survived, although in a few cases they have been relocated to libraries or city halls. Fisher completed his Mount Ayr mural nearly eighty years ago, and Ringgold County is fortunate that it still hangs on the wall it was made for. If you haven’t seen it, you should make the pilgrimage.The Corn Parade is utterly charming and funny. It is a colorful, cartoon daydream of a harvest parade in an Iowa farming community. Its central feature is a float being towed by a tractor. Walking alongside are a trained pig and a marching clown, followed by an unbelievably tall Uncle Sam on stilts.On a wagon on the float is a gigantic ear of corn, too large for any wagon, like those huge Paul Bunyan vegetables on humorous vintage postcards. On top of the corn is a box-like platform for three musicians, who are following the raised baton of an eccentric looking band leader. An ear of corn as massive as this must surely have resulted from a record-breaking corn harvest. Now that is something to crow about, a rooster on the corn proclaims, and a billboard on the right contends that CORN IS KING.When asked about the mural, Fisher replied that some of its characters were based on actual residents of Ringgold County. For example, one of the figures is the Mount Ayr postmaster, above whose door the mural would hang. The mayor of the city is mounted on a horse on the left, and the photographer, tractor driver, and others were also local citizens.The Corn Parade is not an easel painting, but a large wall mural that measures 11 feet wide and 5 feet high. Fisher had twice studied briefly with the French Academy-trained Iowa artist Charles A. Cumming at his Cumming School of Art in Des Moines. Other than that, Fisher was self-taught, or learned through correspondence schools. He recalled that from an early age, he was preoccupied with drawing, an interest that never abated. As he put it, “everywhere I have gone I have drawn. I have drawn almost everything imaginable…except a salary.”He had a life-long interest in illustration, design and cartooning, and he especially admired the drawings of Ding Darling, the celebrated Des Moines Register editorial cartoonist.In every square inch, there is a whimsical energy in The Corn Parade. As restless as a rolling stone, the zany mural reflects the zigzag paths in Fisher’s life. After flunking Latin and German at Drake University in his early twenties, he “quit school and went West.” In Wyoming, as he later recalled, he “got work on a ranch…organized a Sunday School; drove an eight-horse freight team with one line 90 miles across the desert; slept on the ground and in a covered wagon when 40 degrees below zero; heard the coyotes howl; rode a four-horse load of pine logs down the mountain behind a run-away team, but escaped with only bruises; fell through the ice riding a horse across a mountain stream, jumped to solid ice and escaped, but the horse chilled to death; bet Uncle Sam that I could live on a quarter section of land, and I won the bet; built a log cabin, hunted deer and elk and really ate bear meat.”He was also an erstwhile inventor, and, at age 19, he received a US Patent (No. 759,257) for an Automatic Whistle Operating Mechanism for locomotives. Later, having returned to Iowa from his adventures in the West, he worked as an electrical signalman for the railroad, made illustrations and cartoons for signalman publications, and worked as an advertising artist for a farm implement company in Waterloo, Iowa. But after while, he gave that up and, once again, he headed West.For a while, he toured scenic vistas in “Max” (a 1917 Maxwell Touring Car in which he camped), painting landscapes en plein air. He made comical “get well soon” postcards that were sold in hospital gift shops. He also spent some time out East, where he built a studio and joined the artists’ colony at Woodstock, New York.In the last phase of his life, he went West a final time, settled in California, and died in 1974 in Fresno. In retrospect, Orr Fisher led his life as a kind of parade. He was a free spirit, always in motion—and marching to a drummer that only he himself could hear.Submitted by Roy R. Behrens, emeritus professor and distinguished scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. For more on Orr Fisher, see Orr C. Fisher, The Corn Parade. Wall mural (1941). US Post Office, Mount Ayr, Iowa. This article was first published in The Iowa Source (Fairfield IA) Vol 38 No 1 (January 2021), pp. 10-11

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24 x 20 x 1 in