Jurgan Frederick Huge (1809 - 1878)

Inside front cover, pencil: JF Huge's sketchbook lit came from Anne Richardson's home / the ship with French flag / is by far the best drawn

Anne Richardson (artist's granddaughter), Ridgefield, Connecticut
Avis and Rockwell Gardiner, Stamford, Connecticut
David A. Schorsch, New York, 1990

"Compass: Folk Art in Four Directions," New York, The South Street Seaport Museum, June 20-October 7, 2012

Lipman, Jean, "Jurgan Frederick Huge (1809-1878)," In Jean Lipman and Tom Armstrong, eds. American Folk Painters of Three Centuries, New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980, p. 112
--. Rediscovery: Jurgan Frederick Huge (1809-1878), New York: Archives of American Art, 1973, p. 4
Schorsch, David A., "The Lost Sketch Book of Jurgan Frederick Huge," The Clarion (spring 1992): 46-49
American Radiance: The Ralph Esmerian Gift to the American Folk Art Museum, p. 272, fig. 232

Some wear on the edges of paper, drawings are clear.
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Jurgan Frederick Huge is best known for his accurate and detailed ship, landscape, and architectural oils and watercolors.¹ It is not known when Huge emigrated from Germany to Bridgeport, Connecticut, but his marriage by 1830 to Mary Shelton, daughter of a prominent Bridgeport family, indicates that he had probably been in the area for some time. This marriage may have prompted the gradual anglicizing of Huge's name from Jurgen Friedrich.² Throughout his adult life in Bridgeport, Huge seems to have combined his occupation as a grocer with the artistic activities for which he has earned recognition today. Little is known of his life before he immigrated to Connecticut, save that his brother Peter accompanied him; he brought his mother to live with him at a later date.³

Huge's precise rendering of ships and associated maritime features, as seen in New-York Ballance Drydock (1877), lends support to the suggestion that he had some prior familiarity with oceangoing activities.⁴ His paintings of local architecture-such as Burroughs (1876), a building in Bridgeport-document notable local scenes with great accuracy but with an artistic license that provides the most complete and compelling view.⁵ And his paintings of foreign ports, such as A Fanciful View of the Bay of Naples (1877-1888), demonstrate his ability to create a composite landscape from a bird's-eye perspective, with a verisimilitude that permits great detail while stretching the limits of what the eye can take in at one time.⁶

This sketchbook is the only one known by Huge, though the competence of the drawings lends credence to the existence of others. It includes twelve sketches of a romantic nature: a shepherdess with sheep, a ruined castle, a steam packet flying a French flag, and a forest chase scene of dogs running after a bird. Although the sketches have a European sensibility, they were probably drawn in Bridgeport rather than Germany and were perhaps based upon published prints, as they have a conventionalized quality.⁷ They show an awareness of perspective and foreshortening-in the challenging pose of the shepherdess, for instance, who sits on the ground with one arm leaning on a mound, the other crooked at the elbow and holding a tuft of grass. They also relate to the type of copy patterns provided by drawing instructors, an occupation that Huge himself advertised after 1872. The sketchbook descended with a daguerreotype, c. 1863, that purportedly portrays Huge himself. -S.C.H.

¹ Bunkerhill (1838) was the first painting by Huge to come to the attention of Jean Lipman during the 1940s. Over the course of the next forty years, she diligently researched and rediscovered more than fifty paintings by the artist, publishing her findings in several articles and exhibitions. All the biographical information contained herein is based on these sources. The last summary of these findings was published in Jean Lipman, "Jurgan Frederick Huge (1809-1878)," in Jean Lipman and Tom Armstrong, eds., American Folk Painters of Three Centuries (New York: Hudson Hills Press in association with WMAA, 1980), pp. 110-15.

² Ibid., p. 110.

³ Ibid., pp. 111-12; Lipman cites family tradition that Peter and Jurgan were sea captains who worked their way to America and continued in maritime-related occupations until they found new vocations.

⁴ Alice M. Kaplan Collection; see ibid., pp. 110, 111.

⁵ Collection Bridgeport Public Library, Bridgeport, Conn.; see ibid., p. 115.

⁶ Jean Lipman, "Jurgan Frederick Huge," The Magazine Antiques 132, no. 3 (September 1987): 546-47.

⁷ David A. Schorsch raises the possibility that the drawings were executed in Germany when Huge was still a very young man; see Schorsch, "The Lost Sketch Book of Jurgan Frederick Huge," The Clarion (spring 1992): 48. However, the competence of the draftsmanship and conjecture that Huge was in Connecticut well before 1830 more strongly suggest that the sketches were drawn in Connecticut.