American Art Collaborative

In 1946, Charles Sheeler was invited by the Addison Gallery of American Art of Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, to serve as the museum’s first artist-in-residence, one of the earliest programs of its kind in the country. The artist arrived in October and spent the one-month residency making preparatory photographs and sketches of the surrounding industrial landscape. Sheeler was quickly drawn to the working-class neighborhood of Ballardvale, just outside the town of Andover, where he photographed its abandoned woolen mills on the Shawsheen River. He then returned to his studio in Irvington-on-Hudson, New York, to complete a series of paintings on the subject. The tempera study in Colby’s collection and the larger oil painting in the collection of the Addison were completed at the end of that year; for the next seven years, Sheeler continued to paint Ballardvale factory subjects. The Mill—Ballardvale was purchased in 1957 from the artist’s dealer Edith Halpert, of the Downtown Gallery, New York, by Adelaide Moise and was given to Colby in 1979 in honor of her husband, William. The painting, with its linear forms and flat brushwork, exemplifies the Precisionist style that characterized Sheeler’s work throughout his career. Sheeler, along with other American modernists of the first half of the 20th century, including Morton Schamberg, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Charles Demuth, established a visual language of efficiency, economy, and simplicity of form. In The Mill—Ballardvale, Sheeler reduced the mill’s architectonic volumes into hard-edged planes, thereby giving the painting the appearance of having been assembled as much as painted. While remaining tied to a representational tradition, Sheeler also abstracted the scene through the pyramidal shapes—echoing the mill’s gabled roofs and towering chimney—of green and blue that fill the sky. By the time Sheeler arrived in Andover, he was well versed in depicting the American industrial landscape. A commission for Ford Motor Company nearly 20 years earlier, in 1927, generated his first photographs and paintings of American industrial subjects. In 1930, he executed American Landscape, his first of four paintings of Ford’s monumental automobile factory, the River Rouge. The Mill—Ballardvale, like the iconic American Landscape, is drawn from a photograph he took at the site, and Sheeler’s translation from photograph to painting provides an instructive look at not only his Precisionist aesthetic but also his particular vision of American industry.[1] Sheeler frequently used his photographs as source material for his paintings; at times he would crop the composition and simplify the formal rhetoric of the image as he moved from machine- to hand-made images. For instance, the reference photograph for The Mill—Ballardvale includes details that Sheeler ultimately elided in the painting, such as a crumbling and paint-splattered brick façade, broken windows, and overgrown brush. Sheeler effectively cleaned up the factory’s disrepair (significantly, the Precisionists were also called “Immaculates” at the time) into an idealized and orderly scene. As a result, there is a sense of stillness and quiet to the Ballardvale tempera that is characteristic of the artist’s depictions of industry. Yet Sheeler’s representation of the textile mill is not a univocally aggrandizing view. Showing a deserted factory, The Mill—Ballardvale is also a painting that references the failures of industry. The mill was closed in 1930 at the onset of the economic chaos wrought by the Depression. Years later, in a 1958 interview, Sheeler would recall the Ballardvale mills as “carcasses,” referring to the devastating evacuation of industry from this once-booming town.Sharon Corwin1. Sheeler’s oil American Landscape, 1930, is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. His reference photograph for The Mill—Ballardvale is in the Lane Collection.