Charles Demuth & The Tobacco Shop
Although Charles Demuth grew up around the tobacco industry, he showed little interest in continuing with the family business. Fortunately, his parents did encourage their son in his other interests including the visual arts. As a young boy he was given lessons by local teachers in china painting and landscape painting. Demuth also had many sketchbooks that he filled with whimsical paintings of flowers and creatures from the family’s infamous Victorian garden.
Charles wasn’t the only creative person in the family. His father, Ferdinand Demuth was an amateur photographer and member of the Lancaster Camera Club. The numerous images we have of Demuth as a child, growing up in one of Lancaster’s leading tobacco manufacturies is because of Ferdinand’s prolific photography.
As Demuth and his artistic style grew, the influence of the urbanization that surrounded him became apparent. Specifically in the work completed in the early 1930s, the artist often interpreted structures in his hometown of Lancaster, including several examples of tobacco factories.
Charles Demuth, …And the Home of the Brave, 1931, oil and graphite on fiber board, Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, gift of Georgia O'Keeffe
Demuth’s …And the Home of the Brave (1931) depicts two water towers atop a Lancaster cigar factory. Note the number 72 at the lower edge of the painting refers to the state highway, Manheim Pike, which still runs north from downtown Lancaster. As the title suggests, Demuth was simultaneously attracted and conflicted by the expanding industrial landscape of the United States, a thought shared by many American artists of the early twentieth century.
Charles Demuth, Buildings Abstraction, Lancaster, 1931, oil on board, Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase, General Membership Fund
Buildings Abstraction, Lancaster (1931) portrays a historic tobacco warehouse complex in Lancaster on North Water Street at West Liberty Street. There were multiple tobacco businesses within the complex, but we can identify that Demuth is depicting the Otto Eisenlohr and Brothers building by the text on the water tower in the foreground “EISI - CI- '' which would have spelled Eisenlohr Cigars. The structure still stands today and is now home to the Lancaster Leaf Tobacco Company where tobacco is processed and stored.
