The Fossil Hunters
The Fossil Hunters, 1926–28, contains the most explicit references to Dickinson's roots and loved ones. The title refers to the fossils that Dickinson had searched for as a child in Sheldrake, and again while visiting in the summer of 1926 before starting work on the painting. Dickinson may well have intended the painting to be a means of "rescuing" his brother Burgess through art: a death mask of Beethoven is depicted, but with eyes open, unlike the actual death mask. Dickinson opened the eyes in his painting, and in so doing, not only immortalized his brother, but gave him back the life he remembered him having.
Adler sees the old man as holding a stick (a symbolic paintbrush) to the grindstone as expressing the artist's "'labor' to give birth to something eternal", and the reference to a hunt for fossils referring to this desire to leave behind remains that will survive death. Dickinson himself admitted that the desire to make something as lasting as the work of the old masters was manifested in the size of the work (at 96½ inches high it was the largest painting he had done).
Read more about this topic: Edwin Dickinson
Famous quotes containing the word fossil:
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)