Clare Leighton and the American South

Caroline Hickman

Anglo-American master wood engraver, sensitive illustrator of Hardy and Thoreau, celebrated author of books on rural life—Clare Leighton (1898-1989) created timeless impressions of agrarian life in England and the American South even as she witnessed the devastation wrought by the world wars and observed economic, social, and political unrest on the two continents during the interwar years.  At face
value, her wood engravings depicting agrarian life  appear not to relate to these tumultuous world events and seem a stalwart continuation of the English pastoral tradition. While her graphic work continued an idealized, even nostalgic view of rural life, it was also a rebuttal of specific contemporary circumstances. Leighton’s imagery, when read with her prose, is an intensely personal commentary on the foremost issues confronting mankind during her time—war and mechanization, social and economic inequality, the gentrification of the countryside, and the spiritual poverty caused by these societal ills.

Instead of satirizing or depicting these issues directly, her imagery reflected a worldview that valued the universal nature of creative mankind and the kinship that workers of the soil share throughout the world. Artists and writers, social and economic reformers, as well as the general public perceived in Leighton’s imagery a special spiritual quality and poignancy that counteracted the ills of their chaotic times. ¹

Leighton was a prolific wood engraver who created over 850 images and illustrated at least sixty-five books. The Duke University Libraries hold nearly all of the books that she illustrated for her own prose and for other authors as well as sketches, engravings, woodblocks, and archival material for two of her works that depict the American South. Southern Harvest, published by the Macmillan Company in 1942 with nearly sixty wood engravings, is her graphic and written impressions of rural customs and agricultural rites that were still functioning in an increasingly industrialized South. Her twenty-four illustrations for < i>The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore followed in the late 1940s and were published as part of that seven volume series by Duke University Press from 1952-1964.

By the time Clare Leighton immigrated to the United States in 1939, she was already an acclaimed engraver and writer in England. Not only did influential journalists and social thinkers such as Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, J. C. Squire, and N. B. Brailsford acknowledge her as a leader in the revival of wood engraving in Britain, they viewed her imagery as thematically compatible with issues they were championing—Chesterton on land distribution and agriculture reform, Squire on the preservation of rural England and Thomas Hardy’s countryside. Noel Brailsford, editor of the < i>New Leader, took a keen interest in Leighton and published a number of her engravings in that weekly. The socialist’s passionate quest to bring about a better world for the working classes greatly influenced Leighton, and her art reflects her life-long commitment to immortalizing the common man as indispensable feeder of mankind. In her folio-sized < i>Farmer’s Year (1933), rural man acquires heroic stature as he continues the ancient rituals of plowing, sowing, cultivating, and harvesting, even as mechanization and severe economic depression displace more and more workers from the soil.

Terrified by the specter of another war in Europe—her beloved elder brother, Roland, had died in the trenches in France at Christmastime 1914—and to escape an increasingly turbulent personal relationship with Brailsford, Leighton immigrated to America at New Year’s 1939 to make a new life for herself and her art. The colorful nature of the South had captivated her during periodic lecture tours stateside since the late 1920s, and she negotiated with Macmillan to create a book on her impressions of the region. In Baltimore, a welcoming Henry Mencken regaled her with his tart opinions of southern culture and art over frequent lunches at the Belvedere. Based in that southern port, Leighton traveled from Maryland to Florida and through the Deep South, sketching agricultural scenes, the people, and their customs. Her firsthand knowledge of the region was strengthened by friendships with Paul Green, Ellen Glasgow, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, southerners whose writings expressed an intimate kinship with the South and its everyday people. In late 1941 Leighton relocated to North Carolina to work on < i>Southern Harvest, initially settling in Chapel Hill, a center for progressive southern studies since the 1920s, when Howard Odum’s < i>Journal of Social Forces began quantifying conditions in the South and Frederick Koch pioneered southern folk drama with the Carolina Playmakers. In that university town, Leighton found compatible intellectuals like southern novelist Charles Mills and playwright Paul Green, whose dramas championing the common man, both black and white, had received critical acclaim on the New York stage.

Southern Harvest is foremost a book about the common folk of a pre-industrial South, but its full content and style defy simple classification. Wood engravings showing southern agricultural practices and seasonal rituals mingle with documentary, drama, social commentary, even self-psychotherapy. In the engravings, on-the-spot observation and the artist’s rhythmic, elongated style combine to depict the graceful movements of cotton pickers and tobacco loopers in the flatlands as well as scenes of the mountain people milling sorghum, shucking corn, and making apple butter. Leighton’s prose teems with detailed descriptions of farming methods; folklore; her subtle assessment of a South grappling with a post-Civil War, pre-Civil Rights identity; and her own personal concerns—nostalgia for a pre-industrial way of life, abhorrence of war, longing for the land she has fled, and desire to feel at home in her adopted country. The result is a complex book, full of vivid imagery and multiple levels of meaning.

 In the introduction to Southern Harvest, Leighton confesses that the book was created out of her own special need to become rooted in the American continent. She sought kinship by living among the people of the earth and by learning their habits and their lore, writing, “There is a universality about the people that is healing, and it matters little whether one be talking with a plowman in Devonshire or a tobacco farmer in North Carolina.” For Leighton, men and women laboring in the life-sustaining earth is an elemental act that connects all mankind, a theme that underlies all her work.

Leighton’s wood engravings for Southern Harvest focus on several types uniquely associated with the rural South: the African American, the poor white, and the Appalachian mountain people, groups often portrayed as stereotypes in art and literature.² Leighton’s longstanding desire to “sketch Negro types in Florida,” which predates her acquaintance with African Americans, reveals an uninformed perception of the race.³   This perception changed as she toured the South, sketching individual black people at work and learning their stories. Leighton’s drawing style, which includes elongated, flowing lines, precludes her subjects from being simple decoration or caricatures. In “Cotton Picking” and “Tobacco Looping,”  the shape of the long canvas sacks and the bending motion of the African-American pickers create rhythmic patterns that integrate the workers to the land. The result is a pictorial statement of her belief in the symbiotic relation of man and earth, devoid of stereotype or bias.

Leighton’s engravings give little indication of the poverty and harsh working conditions of her subjects. However, she alludes to these conditions textually in the chapter entitled “Cotton,” describing the oppressive heat and long hours that the workers undergo in the fields for a pittance. According to Leighton, the “old Romantic life” of the South, with pale-checked Natchez belle and white-columned plantation house, lingers only in the imagination. Reality lies in “man’s servitude to a growing plant,” in the fields with “the patient figures that chop cotton” and worm tobacco plants “through the heat of the day.”  Leighton exploits the contrast of black and white in both the print and prose images. In the engraving “Cotton Picking” she juxtaposes the blackness of the Negro workers with the “white gold” cotton. In the text she contrasts the cheek of a Natchez belle, “soft and pale as the thick magnolia blossoms in the silvery moonlight,” with the “hard black buckshot earth” from which the cotton pickers, “the color of their voices as rich as their skin,” earn their meager living. Like Paul Green, Ellen Glasgow, Julia Peterkin, and other progressive southern literati, Leighton refused to perpetuate the myths of the Old South. Her interest lay in the common people and indigenous plants of the region, not the aristocrat or the showy azalea.⁴

Several small engravings appear to present African Americans in picturesque and stereotypical fashion until one reads the companion text. As an outsider, Leighton clearly sees the plight of individuals as they struggle under Jim Crow. In the chapter entitled “Old Ollie” (left), Leighton recounts conversations with an elderly, illiterate African American whose grandparents were slaves. Caught between two eras—never a slave, yet too old to have benefited from the recent educational advances for her race—Old Ollie maintains a child-like dependence on her paternalistic, white employer who has recently dismissed her, for she fears she will lose her identity: “Nobody never knows how I’d work myself to death for them—so only I’d have somewhere to belong. For there ain’t nothin’ so lonesome in the whole world as not to belong.” For Leighton the vision of the rootless woman hunting through trashcans for hog feed is more haunting than an escaped slave being hunted in the swamps.⁵ 

The commission to illustrate The < i>Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore came while Leighton was a member of Duke’s Art, Aesthetics, and Music Department during 1943-1945.⁶   Brown, long-time English professor at Duke and North Carolina Folklore Society founder, left his life’s work—a vast collection of folklore—unpublished when he died in 1943. Sketches and archival material at Duke document Leighton’s working method and show that Duke English professor Newman White, the series’ first general editor, commissioned the engravings as general commentary rather than specific illustrations for the text.  After Leighton reviewed the edited material and a lengthy list of White’s suggestions, she made her own list that ranged from seeding the tobacco beds and gathering herbs to fishing in the creek and quilting parties. Bascom Lunsford, director of southern mountain dance and folk festivals, advised her on the proper time of year to travel for the harvesting of various crops and made local contacts for her in western North Carolina. Returning to Durham from a sketching trip in October 1946, Leighton received a letter from her mountain host “Aunt Emma” saying that she had located a man who could help her with “the still business—but he don’t know so much about the cock fight.”   Leighton’s quest for accuracy was fulfilled on a return trip, for the folklore illustrations include the vices “Cockfight” as well as “Moonshiners.”⁷ 

Sketches and the engraving for “Sorghum Boiling” illustrate Leighton’s practiced skill at creating the essence of a composition. In the initial sketches she works from top right to left on the page to create the shapes of the foreground figures and the hills that form the background with a few, swiftly drawn strokes. All the major elements of the finished composition are present in the next sketch, from the couple that stirs the vat of rapidly boiling sorghum juice and the smoke that rises from the wood fire to the mill and distant hills. In the engraving, Leighton shows the various steps in making molasses from sorghum, illustrating not only the boiling process but also the mill used to extract the juice from the cane and the newly harvested sorghum.

In October 1950, Clare Leighton, fortified with “swigs of brandy and mugs of black coffee,” hurriedly vacated her white clapboard house on Hope Valley Road in Durham, sold her press to the Chapel Hill Library, and spent the next two weeks at old Mrs. McDougal’s while she finished the folklore engravings. She consulted with the printers about the wood blocks, took a final glance at Duke and Chapel Hill as she sold sets of the engravings to those universities, attended a farewell party in her honor, and with her domestic and professional commitments fulfilled, left the state “clean” and headed north.

Several weeks later Leighton was still stinging from criticism she had received during the farewell party. Writing her friend the southern novelist Charles Mills from her new home outside Woodbury, Connecticut, an emotionally and physically drained Leighton described the horror she had felt when a “disappointed and distressed” partygoer had attacked her for abandoning her duty to “sound the clarion call of the New South.”  She lambasted Chapel Hill as a “place of intellectual incest,” and boasted that the Woodbury countryside was “far lovelier than anything around Durham—but then, that would not be difficult, would it?” Then with a slight turn of conscience, Leighton admitted that the move had been spiritually confusing, confessing “One doesn’t break with such a deep, lengthy setting with ease.”⁸ 

Leighton did abandon the South for the North, but her engravings and prose, with their masterful balance of nature and design, their careful recording of past agricultural practices, and their insightful impressions of the English yeoman and southern American farmer during an era of world chaos, continue to resonate for all of us, wherever we’re from. Timeless images depict the ancient rituals of plowing, sowing, cultivating, and harvesting and underscore the cycles of nature, the rhythms of life, and man’s true locus within the universe. Paul Green observed that Leighton captured “the dignity and poetry of living souls upon a living earth.”⁹   Leighton’s love of the people of the world freed her to create images that transcend time and place, class and race.  

Caroline Mesrobian Hickman ’75, a Washington, D.C. art and architectural historian, is writing her Ph.D. dissertation on Clare Leighton and her imagery of agrarian life in England and the American South for UNC-Chapel Hill. 

¹ For example, New School for Social Research Director Alvin Johnson and master etcher John Taylor Arms found her prints spiritually enriching. Alvin Johnson to Clare Leighton, August 12, 1936 and John Taylor Arms to Clare Leighton, March 18, 1949, Clare Leighton Papers, owned by the estate of Clare Leighton, microfilmed by the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

² I discuss Leighton’s impressions of the Appalachian people in “Graphic Images and Agrarian Traditions: Bayard Wootten, Clare Leighton, and Southern Appalachia,” in Judy L. Larson, ed., Graphic Arts and the South (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991), 245-277.

³ Leighton’s commission to illustrate H.M. Tomlinson’s The Sea and the Jungle (1930) must have stimulated her interest in sketching blacks from life. The engraving for the frontispiece, “The Negress,” shows a bare breasted black woman with her children in the tropics.

⁴ Clare Leighton, Southern Harvest, (New York: Macmillan Co., 1942), 3-11.

⁵ Ibid.,  45-50.

⁶ Leighton was a visiting lecturer at Duke in 1942; the next year department head Katherine Gilbert hired her to teach “Representation and Design” and a “laboratory” course. Leighton and her students created in the East Duke Building a now-concealed mural that depicts North Carolina cotton and tobacco workers. Her students also illustrated One and Twenty: Duke Narrative and Verse, 1924-1945, edited by William Blackburn (Duke University Press, 1945), which consists of articles from Duke’s literary magazines, The Archive and The Distaff, including a piece by William Styron.

⁷ “Aunt Emma” to Clare Leighton, October 9, 1946, Clare Leighton Papers.

⁸ From Clare Leighton to Charles Mills, 31 October 1950, Folder 18, in the Charles Mills Papers #4270, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill..

⁹ Quoted from Green’s essay for the Southern Harvest dust jacket.