Label
Social Security, 1946
Francis P. Colburn (1909-1984)
Burlington, Vermont
Oil on canvas
Given in Memory of Francis Colburn, #2008.8.1
Noted Vermont artist and humorist Francis Colburn painted the Vermont scene, with a special sensitivity to characters, for over fifty years. For much of the Great Depression he painted in southern Vermont where his realist style evoked the struggle and stoicism of farm families confronting the challenges of working failing hill farms. In the 1940s he moved to Burlington where he founded and chaired the art department at the University of Vermont.
This portrait, painted in his later, more-abstract style, is entitled “Social Security.” In composition it relates to earlier, darker works reflecting the fragility of life on a hill farm. However, this piece with its bright colors, smiling subject, and ordered landscape evokes a sense of relief brought by the federal social safety net.
For most of its history, the only financial security available in Vermont was land ownership. Throughout the early 20th century, the production value of this land quickly declined making the farms liabilities to their owners. Industrial workers often owned no property and lived hand-to-mouth as long as work was available. The advent of Social Security as part of the large New Deal suite of legislation allowed most Vermonters the first glimpse of financial security they had ever seen.Label
Francis Colburn (1909-1984) was an artist in residence and chairman of Art Department at the University of Vermont during the mid twentieth century. A native Vermonter, who graduated from UVM, he studied at the Art Students League in New York City in the 1930s and with Stefan Hirsch at Bennington College. The donor, who was a friend of Colburn's, recalled that he described this painting as his composite of the many older women he remembered in the community where he grew up.