Could it be the man who painted the works in the Hertzler House at George Rogers Clark Park was S. Jerome Uhl, whose portrait of President Grover Cleveland is in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington — and who has two portraits in the Springfield Museum of Art?
The answer ultimately would come to them in a flash of light. But before that, there was work to be done.
Dirty pictures
The portraits of Daniel and Catharine at the Hertzler House are thought to be one of three sets produced in the 1870s for the three of the 10 the Hertzlers children then alive.
A set that belonged to Barbara Hertzler Huffman is in the archives of the Clark County Historical Society. A set done for Annie Hertzler Snyder was sold at auction and its whereabouts is unknown.
It’s the third set, done for Mary Hertzler Rubsam, that her granddaughter donated to the Hertzler House in 1995. (The house is part of the Clark County Park District.)
“They had never been cleaned, and they needed to be cleaned when we got them,” DeVore said. “But it’s very expensive.”
“When I became president two years ago,” said Arnold, “it’s something I wanted to do.”
They then met New Carlisle artist and art restorer Cathy Harvey at a Fairborn Art Association meeting. Learning that Harvey would do a painting for $200 (a fraction of what they’d expected to pay), Arnold, DeVore and other members of the Hertzler House Committee jumped at the chance.
In the end, the portraits “just bloomed,” DeVore said. But before that, Harvey had to make her way through decades of the dust and dirt of history.
Carbon dating
“These were old, old portraits,” said Harvey, who has restored hundreds of paintings in an art career of more than 40 years. “I doubt if there was much wood smoke,” she said. “It was much too gritty.”
Her best guess was that the oils had hung for decades in homes heated by coal, the smoke from which leaves behind the kind of grit she found on Daniel’s portrait.
The dirt was so heavy, “you could not find a vest” in the painting that was there all the time, she said.
“He had buttons, lapel trim. And you could not see any of those things. It was all black — just an all black portrait.”
Even before she began working on Mr. Hertzler’s clothing, however, Harvey knew the detail would be there.
She saw it in Mr. Hertzler’s face.
“I could tell this was a very wonderful artist because of the flesh tones,” Harvey said. “The skin was beautiful.”
An artist with that kind of skill likely would also have the skill to reproduce the clothing with great accuracy, she reasoned.
As apparent to Harvey was the kind of paint involved.
“These were not brush oils, because I could not find brush marks,” Harvey said. “They were a medium tone, a transparent tone.”
A stick in the eye
Starting in a bottom corner, a less critical part of the painting, Harvey worked her way around, cleaning with cotton, toothpicks and a special solution.
She uncovered a tie and found the weave in his off-white linen shirt. Buttons and lapel trim emerged, as did the shape of his beard, which had faded into the blackness.
“Then I went into his face,” she said. Working the cotton and solution into his nostrils and eyes with tiny wood skewers, she saw the dirt come away.
“Then I used a tiny, tiny pencil to put a catch-light in the eyes,” she said — the kind of glint that makes a portrait come alive.
“I knew with the type of painting this was, somebody knew exactly what they were doing, so I put everything back.”
Red-letter day
Although Harvey never found S. Jerome Uhl’s distinctive signature on the painting, the committee members were so pleased with the result they asked her to clean Mrs. Hertzler’s portrait right away.
The results proved to be more dramatic.
“She had a black shawl on with lace trim,” Harvey said. “It’s like a dot and dash (pattern) and I picked up on that. You find one thing, then you look around and you find another little bit,” she added. “After a while, you can piece it all together.”
The brocade and taffeta emerged in Mrs. Hertzler’s clothing, just as the linen weave had in her husband’s. And, finally, Harvey got to the catch light in Mrs. Hertzler’s eye as well.
It was while DeVore and Arnold were examining the cleaned portrait of Mrs. Hertzler as it sat on a coffee table that Arnold spotted something.
“The sun hit it just the right way,” DeVore said. Uhl’s signature emerged.
“It’s signed in a dark red (consistent with other Uhl paintings) and it blends in with the dark black and brown,” DeVore said. “We didn’t see it and (Harvey) didn’t see it” until that moment, she said.
Added Arnold: “That was our proof.”
Uhl’s oils
To Harvey, it’s enough proof to declare Mr. Hertzler’s unsigned portrait an Uhl as well.
Having judged many painting contests in her day, Harvey is able to identify the painter of unsigned works by technique alone.
“Whoever painted (Mr. Hertzler’s portrait), they used the same flesh tones,” Harvey said. “They used the same coloring for the cheeks and for the lips, which is so obvious to me.”
Circumstantial evidence also supports the claim.
Although he eventually had studios in Cincinnati, Washington, D.C., and New York, Uhl had a portrait studio at the southwest corner of High and Limestone streets from the time of his training in Cleveland after the Civil War until 1881. During that time, he painted the community’s most prominent people.
The Hertzlers clearly qualified as that.
When Mr. Hertzler died on April 21, 1868, after being shot by his own gun in a home robbery, his milling and distilling business had made him one of the county’s wealthiest men.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.
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