page_title: David Gilmour Blythe
section_title: Adulthood
hierarchical_section_title: David Gilmour Blythe / Adulthood
context_page_description: David Gilmour Blythe was a self-taught American artist best known for paintings which satirically portrayed political and social situations. Blythe was also an accomplished portraitist and poet. He is widely regarded as the Pittsburgh region's pre-eminent nineteenth-century painter.
context_section_description: In the late 1840s Blythe moved from East Liverpool to Uniontown, Pennsylvania, probably due to his courtship of Julia Ann Keffer. The couple had been acquainted since the mid-1840s. Julia's family had relocated to Uniontown sometime around 1847. Julia and David were married in Pittsburgh's Roman Catholic cathedral on September 30, 1848 and set up residence in Uniontown. Blythe established a living as a portraitist in Uniontown, and a large number of his early portraits from that period survive. They are generally in the same stiff manner as his early East Liverpool portraits. In addition to painting, Blythe was commissioned to carve a large poplar (8'2") statue of Lafayette for the cupola of the Uniontown, Pennsylvania courthouse.
  Blythe also invested a great deal of time and energy in painting a panorama — an early forerunner to motion pictures. Blythe's Great Panorama of the Allegheny Mountains was painted on a canvas roll seven feet tall and about 300 feet long. The panorama contained twenty or so scenes picturing eastern locales of aesthetic or historical importance, including Monticello, Fort Necessity, Harper's Ferry, General Braddock's grave, etc.  Panoramas toured various cities and were displayed in rented halls. The canvas was mounted on rollers and each scene was displayed to the paying audience accompanied with narration, and sometimes with music. The subject matter was usually biblical, historical, or scenes of exotic foreign locales such as Egypt. Unfortunately, Blythe's prodigious labors on his panorama came to naught. Though Blythe traveled to exhibit his panorama in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, East Liverpool and a few other locales, it failed to attract interest sufficient to continue touring. Blythe dropped out of the ownership group after the first couple of performances and the panorama eventually disappeared.
  Between 1850 and 1852, Blythe suffered several profound losses in addition to failure of the panorama. Both his father and his wife Julia died. After another statue project in nearby Green County fell through, the Uniontown newspapers published Blythe poems in which he referred to Greene County as "a sow grown fat with buttermilk and meal."  A Greene County newspaper then published a retort by a local poet — the son of the newspaper's publisher — in which Blythe was named too much of a drunk to be worth anyone's attention. Blythe's impudent response was a letter in which he called the poet "pumpkin-headed" and his father "another growling, whining hound."
  After his wife's death, Blythe left Uniontown and began a period of travels throughout the Mississippi River valley. By the mid-1850s, he had returned to East Liverpool. His work as both a painter and a poet had blossomed and grown significantly more confident and mature during this period, perhaps by viewing exhibitions of other painters' works and via heavy reading of English Romantic poets and American mainstays like Longfellow and Poe. The sophisticated group of portraits he produced in the East Liverpool area in these years were noticeably more polished than his early period work. He also wrote a large canon of poetry that was leagues ahead of his early work in its quality and distinctive voice.
  Around 1860, Blythe moved to Pittsburgh, the largest city and art market in the region.  He turned away from poetry and portraiture and instead concentrated on canvases depicting hot-button social and political issues.  Blythe opposed the expansion of both slavery and immigration, and made vigorous visual points regarding both issues in a number of singularly accomplished genre paintings. His work, in conjunction with his views, had become increasingly and bitingly satirical.
caption: Libby Prison, 1863
exif: {"Image Software": "Picasa 3.0", "Image ExifOffset": "50", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1600", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1077", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0210", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "150", "EXIF ImageUniqueID": "865fd1267b67b9543d399ed4d1d736cf"}