Christmas brings celebration, reverence, joy, giving and receiving, but it can be a stressful or melancholy season as well. The holy night, the sparkling ornaments and decorated pine trees, snowy landscapes and lavish feasts have inspired artists for years, along with more poignant moments of those forced by the Christmas whirlwind into darker corners of loneliness or poverty.
Horace Pippin’s Christmas Morning
Horace Pippin (1888-1946) was an African American artist born into very poor circumstances in West Chester, Pennsylvania. As a young man, he worked many odd jobs and served in the “Hell Fighters“ infantry unit in World War I, suffering a serious shoulder wound that nearly ruined his artistic ambitions. Pippin managed to rebuild strength in the injured arm and was able to paint again, and eventually his works became quite sought after.
Pippin claimed to paint directly from life or from memories of life, with a straightforward folk-like style often deceptive in its simplicity. Pippin’s Christmas Morning, Breakfast was completed right before Pippin’s stroke-related death at age 58, and depicts a scene perhaps from Pippin’s childhood. The painting features a woman and a boy on Christmas morning, and though it is just the two of them together, there is a sense of a strong mutual bond.
Pippin’s room is spare, the window shade is ragged and only bright scatter rugs cover the wooden floor, but there is a nice-sized Christmas tree in the corner and under that tree are some presents. One senses that the woman in the painting has put in more than her share of work hours to provide a tree and those gifts, just like she puts great effort into keeping her home neat and providing her boy with a stable and loving environment.
Harry Roseland’s Christmas Morning
Harry Roseland (1867-1950) was a Brooklyn-born artist who painted many well-known genre scenes. Although Roseland was white, he had a sensitivity for the plight of African Americans struggling to find their identity both before and after the Civil War. In Roseland’s 1915 Christmas Morning, however, he shows a younger white couple and their baby, with mother, father and child all dressed up for the holiday.
In contrast to Pippin’s Christmas Morning, Breakfast, Roseland’s room is beautifully decorated and well-furnished, with thick carpeting, deep red walls and fringed lampshades. Still, despite the obvious financial comfort of this family, there seems to be a mannered strain among them, almost as if their fine clothes and furnishings are somewhat repressive. The sense of quiet intimacy in Pippin’s humble scene is not found here, and Christmas appears to be more of a social obligation than a true holiday.
Paul Gauguin’s Christmas Night
Along the way from his birth in Paris to his strange, final days in French Polynesia, Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin spent some time at an artist’s colony in Pont-Aven, Brittany. Gauguin’s 1896 Christmas Night: The Blessing of the Oxen comes from one of these visits, although the work was reportedly completed after Gauguin had gone back to Tahiti.
On a still and hushed night, Breton women guide a pair of oxen toward a nativity scene. A small village and church steeple are beyond them, amid the whiteness of snow. Gauguin was no saint, yet he always yearned for deeper channels of personal spirituality in his work. The simplicity of Gauguin’s figures here, the inclusion of animals and the peaceful backdrop evoke the original manger and child, and the true meaning beyond the birth of Christ—which is often overwhelmed by Christmas itself.
Sources
Christmas Morning, 1945: Horace Pippin -- Cincinnati Art Museum
Christmas Night: Paul Gauguin -- Indianapolis Museum of Art
