Eugene Higgins (1874 - 1958)

Mural Study for The Armistice Letter – Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania Post Office, c. 1938, watercolor on paper, 5 ½ x 10 ½ inches (unframed sheet), 12 ¾ x 16 ½ inches (framed sheet), initialed “EH” lower right, inscribed lower left “11/16 = 1 foot”, inscribed “Eugene Higgins” verso of original backing material

$1,250

The Treasury Department's Section of Fine Art (Section) commissioned Eugene Higgins to create a mural for the Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania Post Office. A generation older than many of the WPA Era artists, Higgins was an Ashcan and social realist painter who had trained in France at the turn of the 20th Century where he was influenced by European Old Masters and 19th-century painting. Raised in Saint Louis, Higgins was already an associate member of the National Academy of Design by the 1920s.

Edward Beatty Rowan, a senior Section administrator became familiar with Higgin’s work by at least 1929. In reviewing the All-American exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, Rowan wrote approvingly of Higgins’ second prize-winning painting The Storm, and another entry Old House By Moonlight. “In color and treatment,” Rowan wrote, “one is reminded of that great but little-known American Albert P. Ryder and the more popular Frenchman Honore Daumier.” Rowan arranged for Higgin’s prize-winning painting, together with several other paintings from the Chicago exhibition, including Grant Woods’ Woman with a Plant, to be exhibited at the Little Gallery in Cedar Rapids the following year.

In 1938, Rowan’s Section awarded the Beaver Falls mural commission to Higgins. Like Higgins’ work celebrates the US mail service, in this case, as a vital conduit to world events. In The Armistice Letter Study, the left passage of the mural depicts a family huddled around its rural mailbox reading a letter and newspaper announcing the end of World War I. The viewer is left to imagine the family’s hopes for the safe return from France of the young son, brother, and perhaps boyfriend. To the right of the mural, a burly team of horses plows a field and a single oversized white dove soars into the sky which transforms from dark to light. Completed just a year before the start of World War II in Europe, but at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Higgins’ work contemplates the uncertain future by looking to the past. The Armistice Letter Study is directly related to Higgins’s completed mural. The margins are marked with a drafting scale for the completed mural of 11/16 inches to 1 foot. An intermediate study of the same composition for the Beaver Falls Post Office is part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. It is accessible for viewing in the open storage section of the museum.

Born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1874, Eugene Higgins was an Ashcan and social realist painter and printmaker. As a child, Higgins lived in Saint Louis with his father, an Irish stonemason, and builder who had a significant impact on the artist’s later work. He attended the Académie Julian in Paris and the École de Beaux-Arts. During his time studying in France, he reproduced Old Masters in the Louvre and traveled across the continent. After his return to the U.S. in 1904, he established a studio in New York where he remained for the rest of his life while occasionally summering in Old Lyme, Connecticut. From his time in France, Higgins was influenced by Honoré Daumier, Jean Millet, and Michelangelo. The poet Edward Markham described Higgins as "the one powerful painter of the tragic lacks and losses." Often employing a dark and somber palette, Higgins’ pieces focused on the lives of the less fortunate, refugees, the homeless, and the poor. Higgins was an associate member of the National Academy of Design and exhibited widely during the 1920s through 1940s. During the Depression Era, Higgins won three mural commissions from New Deal art projects. He is listed in Who Was Who in American Art and all other standard references.