Information for this story was provided by Tom Fryc of Amsterdam and the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown.

Fritz Vogt Collection

https://collections.fenimoreart.org/collections/5551/fritz-g-vogt/objects

Focus on History

Artist was drawn to country homes

By Bob Cudmore

          He slept in barns and relieved the pain of rheumatism with too much alcohol. 

He spoke broken English and died at the Montgomery County almshouse in Yosts in 1900.  And he left a collection of 200 drawings that became the subject of an exhibition at the American Folk Art Museum in New York City in 2003.  The retrospective was also displayed in Cooperstown and Orlando, Florida.

          “No one knows what Fritz Vogt did during the first 48 years of his life in Germany, where he was born in 1841,” wrote New York Times reviewer Ken Johnson.  In 1890, Vogt came to America and spent his last ten years as a traveling artist, recording what Johnson called “lucid descriptions” of the homes of his clients, primarily farmers in Schoharie and Montgomery counties.  He did 40 drawings of farms, churches and other buildings in the town of Sharon, for example, and 25 in Canajoharie.

W. Parker Hayes, Jr., a project director for the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition service, produced the catalog book for Vogt’s retrospective, Drawn Home: Fritz Vogt’s Rural America.  The catalog was published by the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown.

At first, Vogt drew realistically with graphite pencils then switched to colored pencils and his work became more complex with multiple perspectives.

“Somebody could have happened to buy him a set of colored pencils,” Hayes said.  “Or somebody said ‘I want this in color’ and all of a sudden his constituency decided, ‘Hey I want my work in color.’”

Why did farmers want pictures of their homes?  Hayes said New York State agriculture was facing competition from the Midwest.  There was nostalgia for the dwindling numbers of “gentleman farmers.”  Vogt’s drawings also mirror another late 19th century social trend—publication of county atlases depicting the homes of wealthy people.

Hayes was able to chronicle Vogt’s life from oral histories recorded in the 1960s, interviews with elderly people who had known Vogt when they were children.  Hayes created a database of Vogt’s work to fill in biographical details in that the artist dated and described each drawing. 

The oral histories, for example, state that Vogt picked hops. “In August of every year from 1891 until he died he didn’t do any drawings,” Hayes said.  “August is the beginning of the hops picking season.  You can prove or verify what’s out there about Fritz Vogt through what the drawings say.”

A few drawings indicate that Vogt was paid a couple of dollars for a specific piece.  Vogt was more often paid in kind, with a place to stay, meals or alcohol. 

 Vogt fit in with the region’s existing German-American population.  “He relied on an ethnic network to get the basic things in life and to find patrons,” Hayes said.  Vogt had a “good rapport” with children and may have earned money by teaching German.

Hayes wrote that Vogt was “a short, smallish man with a quick step, yet slightly rotund.”  Hayes added: “He wore five or six second-hand shirts layered over each other, the underlying shirts visible through holes in the outer layers.  He slept in the shelter of barns between two buffalo-hides on a pile of hay.  When Vogt entered a home to complete his drawings, he wore a pair of slippers or crude shoes fashioned from carpet remnants.”

“There often are little things in his drawings,” Hayes said. “The way a certain cornice has some flourish.  He saw those things.  He knew the homeowners who lived there were very attuned to that.  But at the same time he had a perspective that was different because he didn’t have a home.”

Hayes wrote: “We are left with the great irony of a homeless man who expressed an intimate knowledge of the idea of home.”

Information for this story was provided by Tom Fryc of Amsterdam and the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown.

Tuesday, August 9, 2022- From the Archives of the Daily Gazette-Homeless artist drawn to country homes

Wednesday, August 10, 2022-From the Archives-March 26, 2021-Episode 363-How the Adirondack forest preserve was motorized.  The guest is John Warren, founder and editor of New York Almanack.

Thursday, August 11, 2022- From the Archives of the Daily Gazette—Former Mayor was friends with FDR.

Lionel Fallows, son of Carter’s sister Nellie, said Roosevelt came through for the Amsterdam mayor.  It was a triumvirate, Fallows said, with three Democrats in power—Carter, New York Governor Herbert Lehman and Roosevelt.

This Friday, August 12, 2022-Episode 435

Susanne Dunlap discusses her book The Portraitist, a novel based on the life of 18th century French artist Adélaïde Labilleo-Guiard whose life went on amid the changes and terror of the French Revolution.

Based on a true story, this is the tale of Adélaïe Labille-Guiard’s fight to take her rightful place in the competitive art world of eighteenth-century Paris. With a beautiful rival who’s better connected and better trained than she is, Adélaïde faces an uphill battle.

Mohawk Valley Weather, Tuesday, August 9, 2022

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