Born Everard Jean Hinrichs, Eric Sloane (1905-1985) was a prolific American artist perhaps best known for his work chronicling Early American rural life and culture. He worked hard to become a successful author, illustrator, and landscape painter. It is worth noting that Sloane won recognition and some fame for all these skills – and all within his lifetime.
Sloane’s youth appeared restless, if not somewhat indulged. Persuading his father to finance his art education, Sloane’s attendance at various art schools was sporadic, resulting in his eventual departure from each institution. Despite this, he gleaned a crucial lesson from his brief encounters with formal education: the realization that art cannot be taught and the adoption of his now famous pseudonym – Eric Sloane. Notably, during one of his few days of attendance at the Art Students League, Sloane overheard a conversation between teachers George Luks and John Sloan. The two were discussing the merits of beginning a career painting under an assumed name, later reverting to one’s given name after significant study and improvement. Inspired by this notion, Sloane adopted “Sloan” from his instructor and added an “e” to avoid implying a familial connection, while “Eric” was drawn from the middle of “America”.
As a teen, Sloane ran away from home several times, often covering great distances. He once stole his father’s Model T Ford, forging the license plates in the process. He drove across much of the Continental Unites States, an escape that provided thousands of recollections to which an older Sloane would return in print and oil paints. He illustrated and painted along the way, trading menu lettering and decorations for meals, lettering windows and doors at hotels for rooms, somehow managing to keep enough fuel in the Model T. He also sketched and painted, most especially around Taos, New Mexico, by then an artist colony. When planning his return to New York City, Sloane decided that he would return as an artist.
Back in the city where he was born, Sloane found work as a muralist and sign painter at the Coney Island Amusement Park. He found lodging at the Half Moon Hotel, and was soon creating menus, signs, and even a large aviation-related mural behind the hotel bar. The hotel was a meeting place for aviators using Roosevelt Field, including Charles Lindberg, Amelia Earhart, and Wiley Post. It wasn’t long before Eric Sloane was at the airfield, picking up odd jobs of lettering aircraft and painting small murals on fuselages. He began to draw and paint airplanes, usually depicted flying through cloud layers. Some of these works he sold, others he traded for flights so that he could become more skilled at painting clouds and the sky. It was flying with Wiley Post one day that the famed aviation pioneer looked at Eric and said, “You know, someday a fellow will come along and paint nothing but the sky”. Eric decided to be “that fellow” and began painting “cloudscapes”, a term he asserted he coined. Some were massive. As the clouds loomed larger in his paintings, the airplanes became smaller until there was nothing in Sloane’s paintings but clouds and sky.
At lunch one day at the Roosevelt Field Inn, Eric showed his companion a large, foreboding storm he had painted. His luncheon companion was little moved – “Why”, he asked, “would anyone one want to buy a painting of just clouds”? Undaunted, Eric hung the painting on the restaurant wall, replete with a price tag upon which Eric wrote “an exorbitant sum”. Emelia Earnhardt bought the painting.
As America began to mobilize for the Second World War, unsurprisingly Eric concentrated on illustrating and painting military aircraft. He combined his burgeoning understanding of meteorology with his illustrative abilities, authoring several articles for aviation magazines of the period. He contributed to several books including Ernest Vetter’s Let’s Fly: An ABC of Flying (1940), as well as Assen Jordanoff ’s Your Wings (1942). Sloane had published his first book, Clouds, Air and Wind through the Devin-Adair Company in 1941. The United States Army Air Corps took note. Eric contributed to several manuals for training Air Corps pilots, many of whom were barely out of high school. His illustrative style – one that tended towards “comic” and informal, yet deceptively simple drawings full important detail – turned out to be a great learning aid to the young recruits.
During the war, Sloane was commissioned by the parents of a Naval aviator killed on a training mission to create a series of articulated models of weather phenomenon. Their son, Lt. Prentice Willets, was piloting a plane the went down in heavy weather, killing all twelve airmen on board. The weather models Sloane created were quite ingenious and were eventually installed in 1951 at the Hayden Planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History of New York.
Sloane enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s meteorology program, but found the mathematics needed was too difficult and besides, the program lacked the “romance of the weather”. He forged his own path that involved a mixture of weather folklore, self-taught meteorology, and of course refining his illustrative style relative to clouds, the sky, and weather. His weather-related books are a departure from the more didactic titles he wrote in the 1940’s – they were now written in a more personal, informal style. Eric Sloane’s Weather Book (1949), Skies and the Artist (1950), Eric Sloane’s Almanac and Weather Forecaster (1955), The Book of Storms (1956), Look at the Sky (1961), Folklore of American Weather (1963), and For Spacious Skies (1978) read less like training manuals (which, in Sloane’s defense, his works published in the 1940s were intended to be), and more like listening to a kindly uncle explain the weather.
Ironically, it was Sloane’s fascination with the weather that ultimately led him to explore the life and work of the early American farmer. While he was researching material for numerous weather-related articles he had published throughout the 1940s, as well for his third book, Eric Sloane’s Weather Book (1949), Sloane was drawn to the descriptions of weather and weather folklore that he was finding in old farm diaries and almanacs. About the time the book was published, Sloane purchased an 18th century farmhouse near Candlewood Lake in Connecticut, a house sold with a good deal of old furniture and tools stashed away in the attic and barn. Sloane began to pivot from writing about weather, and more towards exploring early American rural material culture of the 18th and 19th century.
The titles of the books Sloane had published starting in 1954 illustrate Sloane’s new focus: American Barns & Covered Bridges (1954), Our Vanishing Landscape (1955), American Yesterday (1956), The Seasons of America Past (1958), Diary of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805 (1962), ABC of Early Americana (1963), A Museum of Early American Tools (1964), A Reverence for Wood (1965), An Age of Barns (1966), The Sound of Bells (1966), The Cracker Barrel (1967), Don’t – A Little Book of Early American Gentility (1968), Mr. Daniels and the Grange (1968), The Second Barrel (1969), I Remember America (1970), Do – A Little Book of Early American Know-How (1972), The Little Red Schoolhouse (1972), The Spirits of ’76 (1973), Legacy (1979), Once Upon a Time: The Way America Was (1982), and Eighty: An American Souvenir (1985).
In 1969, the Sloane-Stanley Museum of Kent, Connecticut, opened to the public. The museum grew from chance encounter between Eric Sloane and Don Davis during an opening of one of Sloane’s exhibits at the New Britain Museum of American Art. Sloane’s exhibit featured several of his placements, paintings of early American tools and artifacts coupled with the objects depicted in each painting. Davis was a young, Harvard-trained, and newly minted CEO of the Stanley Tool Works of New Britain, Connecticut. Davis convinced Sloane – or was it that Sloane convinced Davis? – to donate his early American Tool collection and the Stanley Tool Works would construct a museum building in which the tools could be on display for the public. What the proposal needed was a way to make this last part – “…on display for the public.” – a reality. Enter Eric Hatch, a friend of Sloane’s and a fellow author (Sloane contributed to Hatch’s 1964 A Little Book of Bells), who recently became the Chairman of the Connecticut State Historic Commission. Hatch shepherded a proposal for the state of Connecticut to be the recipient of Sloane’s early American tool collection, and for the state to operate the museum under the aegis of the State Historic Commission. The Sloane-Stanley Museum (now The Eric Sloane Museum), opened to the public on May 30, 1969, and has been in nearly continuous operation.
In 1971, Eric Sloane had published a book that was really his first significant and expansive retrospective of his life’s work. The publication of I Remember America helped the artist’s domestic and international reputation a great deal. In the summer of 1974, the Russian Ministry of Culture invited Sloane
to exhibit the paintings in I Remember America at the Russian Academy of the Arts. Eric and his wife Mimi traveled to Moscow for the two-week exhibition but were immediately detained by the KGB upon their arrival and their passports taken. Mimi said that “Eric was miserable”. Their passports were eventually returned, and Eric’s exhibition was heralded a success. As a token of his gratitude, Eric Sloane presented one of his paintings to the Russian people. Accepted by Leonid Brezhnev, the painting was a masterful piece of artistic diplomacy involving two intertwined reaping sickles (one of Russian, the other of American design). Brezhnev reportedly kept the painting and hung it in one of his homes.
Recognized as America’s foremost painter of the sky, Sloane was commissioned in 1976 to create a mural for the Independence Avenue lobby of the new Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The 75’ long mural, entitled Earth Flight Environment, depicts the beautiful complexities of our planet’s atmospheric environment.
In his later years, Sloane divided his time between his homes in Warren, Connecticut, and Santa Fe, New Mexico. In contemporary articles written about the artist, Sloane said that he was happiest painting New England scenes while living in Santa Fe, and southwestern scenes when living in Connecticut. He became increasingly vocal about conservation issues and was an incredibly generous benefactor to a wide variety of non-profit organizations. He continued to draw and paint, organizing his work for one of his most significant exhibitions at Hammer Galleries of New York City, one that was to run from March 5th through to the 23rd, 1985. The show – entitled Eighty: An American Souvenir – featured a significant number of the artist’s pen and ink illustrations and oil paintings and was timed to coincide with the release of a beautiful new book of the same title. Eric never made this birthday celebration, as he died of a heart attack on the streets of New York, on the morning of the opening day of the exhibit.
