Homeless man sketched the homes of others
By Bob Cudmore, Focus on History, Daily Gazette, 07-01-17
Fritz Vogt slept in barns and relieved the pain of rheumatism with alcohol. He spoke broken English and died at a poorhouse. Yet he left a collection of 200 drawings that have been prized by art collectors and exhibited at museums
“No one knows what Fritz Vogt did during the first 48 years of his life in Germany, where he was born in 1841,” wrote New York Times reviewer Ken Johnson in 2003.
Vogt came to America in 1890 and spent his last ten years as a traveling artist, recording what Johnson called “lucid descriptions” of the homes of clients, primarily farmers in Schoharie, Montgomery, Otsego, Fulton and Herkimer counties.
He did 40 drawings of farms, churches and other buildings in the town of Sharon, for example, and 25 in Canajoharie.
He died in the poorhouse of the town of Palatine in 1900. The ledger from the Commissioner of the Poor in Palatine for that year, stored at the Old Court House in Fonda, has a notation for a request for remuneration for Vogt’s burial expenses.
The late W. Parker Hayes, Jr., a project director for the Smithsonian Institution’s traveling exhibition service, produced a catalog book for Vogt’s retrospective, “Drawn Home: Fritz Vogt’s Rural America.” The catalog was published by the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown. The Arkell Museum in Canajoharie has displayed Vogt’s work as has the American Folk Art Museum in New York City.
At first, Vogt drew realistically with graphite pencils then switched to colored pencils and his work became more complex with multiple perspectives.
“Somebody could have happened to buy him a set of colored pencils,” Hayes said. “Or somebody said ‘I want this in color’ and all of a sudden his constituency decided, ‘Hey I want my work in color.’”
Why did farmers want pictures of their homes? Hayes said New York agriculture was facing competition from the Midwest. There was nostalgia for the dwindling numbers of “gentleman farmers.” Vogt’s drawings also mirror another late 19th century social trend—publication of county atlases depicting the homes of wealthy people.
Hayes was able to chronicle aspects of Vogt’s life from oral histories recorded in the 1960s, interviews with elderly people who had known Vogt when they were children. Hayes created a database of Vogt’s work to fill in biographical details in that the artist dated and described each drawing.
Hayes said the oral histories noted that Vogt picked hops, “In August of every year from 1891 until he died he didn’t do any drawings. August is the beginning of the hops picking season.”
A few drawings indicate that Vogt was paid a couple of dollars for a specific piece. Vogt was more often paid in kind, with a place to stay, meals or alcohol.
Vogt fit in with the region’s existing German-American population. “He relied on an ethnic network to get the basic things in life and to find patrons,” Hayes said. Vogt had a “good rapport” with children and may have earned money by teaching German.
According to Hayes, Vogt was “a short, smallish man with a quick step, yet slightly rotund.” Hayes added, “He wore five or six second-hand shirts layered over each other, the underlying shirts visible through holes in the outer layers. He slept in the shelter of barns between two buffalo-hides on a pile of hay. When Vogt entered a home to complete his drawings, he wore a pair of slippers or crude shoes fashioned from carpet remnants.”
Hayes wrote, “We are left with the great irony of a homeless man who expressed an intimate knowledge of the idea of home.”
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