Transcript: F. Scott Hess - Collector

For Arts Sake

Episode "F. Scott Hess Collector"

F. Scott Hess: A few years ago, three years ago, I was out east visiting a friend who was also an amateur genealogist. And she said well give me the names of your grandparent’s. So I did that, and within half an hour she pulled up there wedding announcement in the New York Times. I got an email from her and it had a picture of the senator, she said in the email, on one line this is your great, great grandfather. And after that I was hooked.

It was said that Alfred Iverson gave, gave the first speech ever on succession on the floor of the US senate. This particular piece was created by famous American artist Winslow Homer. And it was done from photographs done by Matthew Brady, the most famous photographer of his day.

A few years ago I found out about my family history and started collecting some works. These come from; these works are from Calvin Lemieux Hule a painter who lived in Missouri in the middle of the 1850's. I have a cousin, a distant cousin, who has collected a number of these works. She is 92 years old; she is not in very good health. And as she is running out of money I am buying these paintings from her. SO I have collected now 7 paintings from Calvin Lemieux Hule, she has over a dozen all together. She is a little bit secretive so I am not sure how many she has got. He is somewhat of an unknown painter in Missouri, but he was a friend of George Kalem Biggham, and I think historically he will become a very important painter in Missouri history.

Calvin Lemieux Hule, the footsore painter from Missouri. Was born in 1811, he died in 1863 after the wounds that he sustained in the battle of Pea Ridge. He was a intenerate painter. He traveled around Missouri, mostly painting portraits of people. He somehow ran into my great, great grandparents who had moved to Rocheport Missouri in 1856. During the late 50's he painted at least a dozen paintings for these ancestors of mine. These paintings cover approximatly300 years of American history.

This painting depicts the battle of Kings Mountain in the revolutionary war. I had three ancestors fight in that battle The Over Mountain Men came equipped with rifles that they had used to fight the Indians in the backwoods and so those rifles would shoot about three hundred yards. The British muskets would only shoot about a hundred yards. So the Americans came up the hillside and stood behind trees and picked out the British who were outlined against the top of the hill. And in that way could defeat a much better trained and equipped army. They also were very angry and that put a lot of fervor into there attacks. They came up the hill yelling like the Indians they had been fighting. And what later became the rebel yell was first heard on this mountainside.

In 1835 Calvin Hule married Lizzy Pule. And that was in Boonsville Missouri. They had seven sons, of those seven sons; happily for Calvin he didn’t want his sons to become painters. Only one of them became a painter that was his second son, Lemieux Hule. Lemieux traveled all over during the civil war dressed as a woman. He did this to avoid the draft and he was quite successful at it. For awhile he was even an entertainer and a spy, a confederate spy, spying on Butler and his troops in New Orleans.

The general, who is depicted in grey in the back of this painting, back up in here, is my great, great grandfather. He was a brigadier general for the confederates, named Alfred Iverson. He captured, near his birthplace of Clinton Georgia, the highest ranking union soldier captured during the entire civil war. That was major general Stoneman, who was a cavalry officer. When he captured him, my great, great grandfather outsmarted him and trapped him. Stoneman had a much superior force, but he thought he was surrounded and he gave up with 600 or 700 of his men, the rest escaped for awhile. When he realized he had been beaten by such a rag tag southern force, he burst into tears and cried. Eventually he was given back to the union after several months, and fought a little bit more, and eventually became governor of California.

Thaddeus Holt in his early years he was on a number of duels and knife fights and in this particular duel that is depicted here he got part of his jaw shot out. And the family held on to it, he became quite disfigured of course. A sculptor by the name of Lamar Rankin was hired by the family to make this memorial.

Picture this at the convention of 1860 at the Democratic Party, which was attended by Alfred Iverson, although he never used this particular instrument, this was just the secessionist’s megaphone, which they let out there vehemence against the north.

Not only can you go back to the past and keep finding out tons and tons of information. But you also figure out your part of it now, your going to pass into that list soon enough and so will your children and there children and hopefully some of this gets passed down to them and they enjoy it for a few centuries more.