Morris Hirshfield

1876 - 1946

The son of a German mother and a Jewish-Russian father, Morris Hirshfield was born in Poland. From the age of twelve he made wood carvings, amongst them a prayer stand for the village synagogue. He emigrated to the US when he was 18, worked in a New York City coat factory and went on to set up a highly successful business manufacturing slippers. In 1937, Hirshfield retired from work through ill health. He took up painting as a pastime and was recognized soon afterwards as one of the major folk artists of the twentieth century. The influence of his career in the textile industry can be clearly seen in his paintings, which are characterized by bright colors and dense patterns. He would sometimes arrange sketches of the different parts of a design on the canvas as if he were making a garment pattern. Each element, whether an animal, a rug, vegetation or the sky, had its own carefully portrayed, often fanciful texture, and Hirshfield particularly liked to create mother-of-pearl, fur and woven fabric effects. His favorite subjects were animals and women. The women in his paintings resemble tailor’s dummies; he considered the use of a live model to be inappropriate. Hirshfield worked compulsively, sometimes for ten or eleven hours a day. ¹