Inventory of the H. O. Kelly Correspondence Dykes MSS 00111., 1948-1990; bulk 1948-1958
Title:
Inventory of the H. O. Kelly Correspondence 1948-1990; bulk 1948-1958
Born March 6, 1884 in Bucyrus, Ohio, but lured out West as a youth, Harold Osman Kelly (1884-1955) traveled a long, hard road before turning his hand to painting as a means of support. Kelly's father was a Lancaster County, Pennsylvania railroader and his mother an Ohio born German. In Kelly's own words he loved animals and felt a desire to work with them from his earliest years, leaving school at 16 to work in stables around his home.H.O. Kelly's great American dream, however, was to own Western land and raise fine stock, particularly horses. For nearly 40 years of his life he worked in thirty states as a muleskinner, farmer, logger, bull-whacker, mill hand, sheepherder, freighter, and rancher. With the help of family, H.O. and his wife Jessie, whom he met and married in Arkansas, finally bought a farm in the Texas Panhandle in 1921. By 1939, however, the Dust Bowl swirled H.O. Kelly's dream into a bank foreclosure. Health broken after years of hard outdoor work, Kelly and his wife settled in Blanket, Texas, where he turned more and more to his painting, first with watercolors, then in oils by 1947, not only to occupy his mind and time, but to provide a modest supplementary means of support for himself and Jessie. His first one-man show was held at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in 1950. Kelly died in Blanket, Texas December 12, 1955. The tiny colored drawings found on H.O. Kelly's letters and cards to friends and family are a foreshadowing of the lovingly detailed scenes in his oil paintings. As a significant primitive artist, Kelly's paintings present a world of rolling, green pastures, tranquil blue skies, and solid farms and farming towns, also populated by a thick dusting of livestock, including wily goats, unpredictable donkeys, fine mules and lively horses. The robust folk are reminiscent of Kelly's mother's German ancestors in Ohio, similar to those living in Fredericksburg, Texas, a town Kelly often visited for inspiration.As these letters so vividly attest, when Kelly sold a painting, it was the buyer's initiation into a warm friendship with the raconteur artist, not a mere business transaction. Most of the letters in this collection were written by Kelly to his biographer and close friend, William Weber Johnson, and his wife, Elizabeth Ann Johnson. A smaller group of seventeen letters, fifteen by H.O. Kelly and two by his wife Jessie Kelly after his death, is addressed to another art collector and friend, Dallas lawyer, Rudolph Johnson. Also present is an inquiry by Otto Kallir of the Galerie St. Etienne in New York City regarding an American Primitive artist's exhibition to be mounted in early 1952, and correspondence concerning the donation, appraisal and transfer of correspondence and paintings to Texas A & M University collections. William Weber Johnson's 171 letters formed the basis for his research for , a biography of H.O. Kelly, first published by Doubleday in 1960, with a foreword by Western writer Tom Lea. was later published in 1979 in a revised, illustrated edition by Texas A & M University Press. The illustrations for the second edition of are reproductions of paintings from various private and public collections, including that of Texas A & M University. Kelly Blue Kelly Blue Kelly Blue
ArchivalResource:
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/taro/tamucush/00111/00111-P.html View
View in SNAC
