Send an ecard of this image

Fleshing out Daily Life

Our traveling show Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, yesterday.

Scenes of American Life features sixty-two paintings and sculptures that showcase the exhilaration of the Roaring Twenties, the stark drama of the Great Depression, the common cause of the War years, and the country's new confidence after World War II and beyond.

In today's painting, Frank C. Kirk presents two exhausted miners as they make their way home at the end of the day. He shows them as heroic figures silhouetted against the sky, physically strong and temperamentally stoic, yet close enough that we can see the soot on their flushed, weathered faces.

This canvas embodies the artist' s beliefs: "What should be my credo other than my work that reflects life around me—episodes of daily struggle and human drama?"

Source: Virginia Mecklenburg. Scenes of American Life: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).

Pictured: Frank C. Kirk, 1889–1963, Homeward, 1933, oil, 48 1/8 x 38 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Mrs. Frank Cohen Kirk.