Weary

Painted in 1937 in gouache on paperboard at sheet dimensions of approximately 19 by 22 inches, Weary depicts a single male figure — almost certainly an out-of-work labourer of the kind whose collective image dominates the contemporary Flop House — in a landscape setting that combines the social-documentary register of Federal-period realism with the more elegiac, almost iconic frontal pose of his exhausted sitter. The figure is rendered in the disciplined contour-and-modelled vocabulary of Millman's Chicago training under Leon Kroll, with the gouache handled in the dry, matte manner that he favoured for his Federal-period works on paper. The picture is a key example of the smaller-scale studio work that Millman undertook in parallel with his great public murals of the 1937-38 period and that the Federal Art Project supported as easel painting alongside the great Treasury Section commissions; it survives, like Flop House and Deserted Well, through the General Services Administration's 1971 transfer of Federal Art Project works on paper to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (accession 1971.447.71). The image entered the public record again in 2009 when the SAAM published it via the Smithsonian's Flickr stream as part of the museum's promotion of the Federal collection.