Deserted Well

Painted in 1939 in tempera on fiberboard at dimensions of approximately 15 by 24 inches, Deserted Well is the latest of Millman's three Smithsonian-held Depression-era easel pictures and shows him at the moment of transition between the urban social realism of the 1937 Federal works and the more allegorical, monumental mode that he would develop in the great St Louis mural cycle of 1939-42. The composition depicts an abandoned rural well, almost certainly drawn from the parched landscape of the Midwest Dust Bowl that Millman had encountered during his Federal-period travels through Illinois, Iowa and Missouri, and that had been so intensely documented in the same years by the Farm Security Administration photographers under Roy Stryker. The dry tempera handling and earth-bone palette continue from his earlier Federal pictures, but the composition is now more stripped, more emblematic — a single empty hand-pump rising against a desolate ground — and shows the influence of Charles Burchfield's contemporary watercolour landscapes of the deserted rural Midwest. The work entered the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 1971 with the General Services Administration transfer of Federal Art Project easel paintings (accession 1971.447.72) and is the most poetic of the three SAAM-held Millman Depression-era pictures.