Clementine Hunter is a folk artist who was completely integrated into the only world she knew: Melrose Plantation on the Cane River near Natchitoches, Louisiana. Rarely leaving Melrose in her 101 years, Hunter became one of American folk art’s greatest practitioners, and one of Louisiana’s most beloved female artists. Through her simple paintings, she became a significant cultural historian of the activities, joys, and sorrows of everyday plantation life that, in her early years, had changed little since the mid-18th century.
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Hunter was born on Hidden Hill Plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana, in December 1886, the illiterate child of former slaves. When she was a young girl, her father moved the family away from the harsh environment at Hidden Hill (the plantation that was supposedly the basis for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin) to the more hospitable Melrose Plantation. Clementine lived at Melrose for most of the remainder of her life.
Melrose was a cotton plantation founded in 1796 by the freed Congo woman Marie Therese and her son, Augustin Metoyer. It passed into the hands of two white brothers, Henry and Hypolite Herzog, in 1847, who lost it soon after the Civil War. In 1875, Joseph Henry of Ireland bought the property. His son, John Hampton Henry and wife Cammie expanded the pecan groves and restored the old buildings. Under Cammie’s influence, Melrose became a small artist colony. Cammie died in 1948 and her son, John Henry, Jr. and Francois Mignon, a long-time resident at Melrose who championed the work of Clementine Hunter, managed the site.
Most of her life, Hunter picked cotton. As the story goes, New Orleans artist Alberta Kinsey left some paints and brushes behind on one of her visits to Melrose in about 1940. Hunter, who by this time had turned from work in the fields to assist Cammie Henry in the kitchen, found the paints and brushes and asked to paint a picture of her own. She painted a Cane River baptism on a window shade for Melrose resident Francois Mignon. With Mignon’s constant support, Hunter would paint some 5,000 works of art. Her biography has appeared in the Encyclopedia Brittanica; her picture and artworks have been featured in Look, Ebony, The Saturday Evening Post, and other periodicals; she has been the subject of countless articles and several scholarly books; been represented in seminal folk art exhibitions; and her work included in many prominent public collections, among them the Museum of American Folk Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, New Orleans Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the American Museum of Women in the Arts.