​    Since its acquisition from a New York City gallery in 1985, James Chapin’s monumental Nine Workmen (Fig. 3 below, 1942–1945, oil on canvas, 42 ¾ × 57 ¾ inches) has been among the most iconic and popular pictures in the collection of the Asheville Art Museum.  Armed with shovels, wheelbarrows and other implements, the nine figures span a wide range of ages and include, notably, an African-American.  The painting’s title is generic, leaving the observer to speculate regarding the identity of the laborers or the purpose for which they were summoned.  Are they construction workers, road builders or, as proposed by one observer, perhaps even gravediggers?*

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    Chapin first made his mark in the art world with a series of works featuring the Marvins, a family in the hill country of New Jersey on whose farm Chapin lived for five years (1924-1929), performing farming chores and livestock maintenance while not at the easel. “From these shared experiences,” one observer remarked, “Chapin developed a life-long appreciation for honest work”.** The laborers in Nine Workmen are poised for nothing less.

      Although unexplored previously, one wonders whether at least some of the inspiration for Nine Workmen may have derived from Chapin’s likely familiarity with the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps, a federal agency of the Depression era which employed young men between the ages of 17 and 24 and veterans of World War I by undertaking conservation projects in parks, forests, and historic sites throughout the country.  One such project was the improvement of Voorhees State Park, located within the small central New Jersey community of Glen Gardner where Chapin resided.  “Camp Voorhees” hosted a rotating company of about two hundred men who worked at Voorhees and nearby Hacklebarney State Park from 1933 to 1941 under the aegis of the CCC. “By the time the CCC boys were finished working…they had planted trees and built the present-day road systems, shelters, latrines, visitor amenities and trail system; most of which still remains today.”*** Although it’s unlikely that Nine Workmen is a direct portrayal of CCC laborers—the majority of the subjects are older and none wear the traditional CCC-issued attire—their constant community presence over an eight-year period may well have played a role in motivating Chapin to celebrate the heroic work of common laborers in paint. Based on dates appearing on studies for one of the figures in the collection of the Asheville Art Museum, Chapin began preliminary studies for Nine Workmen no later than 1940.  His models were probably locals drawn from a pool that would, by then, have been dramatically shrinking by the absorption of young men into the military.  Moreover, the portrayal of workers independent of any overt connection to the CCC would have been more in keeping with Chapin’s preference for celebrating the virtues of American labor in more universal terms.

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       Also worth noting is the inclusion, albeit at the periphery of the work, of an African-American subject.  Early in his career, Chapin earned a reputation for sensitive and sympathetic portrayals of African-Americans, such as Negro Boxer (1927, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York City) and Ruby Green Singing (1928, Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida).****  In his landmark study The Negro in Art, the renowned African-American art critic Alain Locke noted as much, asserting Chapin’s impact as a “pioneer in exploring the deeper traits and personalities of his Negro subjects.”*****  Long recognized as an acutely socially conscious artist, it is probably no coincidence that Chapin placed his lone black figure symbolically at the periphery of the painting.

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      The study for Nine Workmen in this collection is a fully-realized charcoal composition which only varies from the final version in negligible ways, e.g., a slight shift in orientation of the figure at the far right or the nearly imperceptible adjustment in the tilt of the heads of two of the central figures.  The study bears a date of 1942.  As is frequently the case with Chapin’s work, the painting is inscribed with a multi-year date, in this case 1942-45, indicating that the artist labored over his canvas for at least three years before he was ultimately satisfied.  Expertly rendered—and revealing a bonus on the reverse ( see Fig. 2 and Recollections below)—the charcoal version of Nine Workmen is an outstanding accomplishment in its own right.

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* Richardson, Whitney, Studies for Nine Workmen by James Ormsbee Chapin, essay on the website of the Asheville Art Museum, https://www.ashevilleart.org/work-of-the-week/studies-for-nine-workmen-by-james-ormsbee-chapin/, accessed 1/25/25.

** Anderson, Sherman Reed, James Ormsbee Chapin and the Marvin Paintings: An Epic of the American Farm (unpublished dissertation, 2008), pp. 146, 147 (accessible online).   

*** New Jersey State Park Service website, https://www.nj.gov/dep/parksandforests/parks/voorheesstatepark.html, accessed 1/25/25.

**** Anderson, op. cit., p. 139.

***** Locke, Alain, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and the Negro Theme in Art (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940), p. 140.

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