Ohio native Edward B. Firn (he used the variant spelling "Fern" more often later in his career) was a fixture in the Cincinnati arts community from the Depression until his death in 1966. He attended the Art Academy of Cincinnati and exhibited frequently at the Cincinnati Art Museum as a member of the so-called “New Group” of young artists who came to prominence in the greater Cincinnati region during the early Thirties. Firn won a Fleischmann scholarship which allowed him the freedom to paint wherever he chose for a six-month period; although he could have spent the six months abroad, he chose instead to "paint and understand the land to which he is indigenous."** As the Depression deepened, Firn obtained employment producing easel paintings for the W.P.A.’s Federal Art Project in Cincinnati (at a stipend of $103.40 per month) and murals for the Treasury Relief Art Project in neighboring Kentucky. Among the latter was his 1942 mural for the Pineville, Kentucky post office entitled Kentucky Mountain Mail en Route.

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     Firn’s early subjects were the landscape and people of the Kentucky hills. Firn "likes to paint the people of the mountains . . . because they live close to the heart of nature. They are simple in their desires and in their whole lives, [the artist says], and they are sincere."*** These were the people who inspired County Fair, a Regionalist tour de force whose subjects are strongly reminiscent of the farmers’ wives portrayed by Grant Wood in popular paintings and prints produced during the same period. When it was exhibited at the Cincinnati Art Museum in 1935 (along with Quietude, a peaceful Kentucky landscape now in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum), The Cincinnati Post praised County Fair as “bright and firm in color, intriguing in subject, and dramatic in portrayal.” **** (A newspaper photograph of the artist standing beside County Fair at the 1935 "New Group" exhibition at the Cincinnati Art Museum appears in Fig. 2, below.) The Cincinnati Enquirer termed it "a spicy bit of American life and humor . . . culled from a summer spent in the heart of the Kentucky mountains," adding:

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The character delineation is excellent, but in style it is a bit Grant Woodish, and like Grant Wood, the main figures—the women of the pickle jars—are painted with stereoscopic realism. They stand out definitely in the florid decorative scheme.*****

     Firn’s debt to his older fellow Midwesterner, Grant Wood (1891-1942), is revealed by comparison of County Fair to Wood’s well-known Daughters of Revolution (Fig. 2), painted in 1932. Similarities abound.  Both works employ a stern cast of mostly elderly women, the teacup-toting, giraffe-necked matriarch in Wood’s composition almost perfectly mimicked by the curiously elongated figure in the center of Firn’s canvas. Where a framed reproduction of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware infuses Daughters with an almost oppressive patriotism, Firn employs a palate of red, white and blue and a frieze of American quilts to impart a similar theme in a more temperate manner.  But where Daughters reeks of sarcasm, its back-country counterpart is without rancor. One wonders whether the extra figure in County Fair (the younger woman in the background) might be an avatar for the artist himself.******

     Later in his career, Firn was in considerable demand as a portraitist. Among his subjects was fellow Cincinnatian and United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart.

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* The dating on the front and verso of the work is indistinct. While the date on the label affixed to the rear of the canvas appears to read "10/33", the fact that the work was exhibited at the Cincinnati Art Museum in November of 1935 along with the artist's Quietude, recorded by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as having been executed in 1935, and the likelihood that the artist would have chosen to locally exhibit a more recent work suggests that the 1935 date is the more probable.​

** Freeman, Norine, "In Search of Lost Glory: Painters Firn and Murphy Brothers in Law and Brothers in Art," The Cincinnati Post, November 19, 1935, p. 9.​

*** Freeman, Norine, "Modern Cincinnati Artists: Edward Fern Paints What He Wants, Exactly as It Impresses Him," The Cincinnati Post, January 14, 1935, p. 11.

**** Freeman, "In Search of Lost Glory: Painters Firn and Murphy Borthers in Law and Brothers in Art," ibid.

***** "The Week in Art Circles," Cincinnati Enquirer, November 3, 1935.

****** The foregoing analysis is based, in part, on the observations of George V. Speer in his catalogue entry for County Fair in Enduring America: Selections from the Collection of Art and Peggy Hittner (Northern Arizona University, 2015).