Provenance
Recorded as from Pennsylvania. Purchased from the artist by John Houk; Mrs. Nanny Sedgwick, Indiana County, Pennsylvania; John Houk, until 1936;[1] sold to (Mrs. Bessie B. Mollard, Zelienople, Pennsylvania, 1936-1938/39). (Michael de Sherbinen, New York City, 1939).[2] (Harry Stone, New York, by 1942).[3] Purchased in 1948 by Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch; gift to NGA, 1953.
[1] Katherine Royer, in the _Marion Center Independent_ (Thursday, 8 Aug. 1940), explains the transactions between Houk and Sedgwick, based on detailed notes by Irene Barbor (who was assisting Royer in research) taken during a 28 July 1939 interview with John Houk. William W. Betts, Jr., summarizes this portion of the provenance in a letter of 15 May 1983 (in NGA curatorial files): "In the course of the interview he told her that Linton Park had come to him (we don't know when, but certainly between 1885 and 1904), insisting that he was `badly in need of money,' and that he would like to have Houk purchase _The Flax Scutching_ for $10.00. So Houk did buy the painting...." "John Houk told Mrs. Barbor also that a Mrs. Nanny Sedgwick, who had lived in Indiana County and had seen _The Flax Scutching_ in the Houk Hotel and had admired it, bought the painting from Houk (for $10.00) and took it to St. Louis, Missouri. After her death, her attorney inquired of Houk whether he would like to have the painting back. He did take it back, and Mrs. Barbor presumes that he did so for the same $10.00 and possibly shipping expenses....This is all, of course, before the paintings were sold to Mrs. Mollard (1936)." [2] "A Pennsylvania Primitive Painter: A Gallery Note," _Antiques_ 35 (February 1939): 85, gives the [then] current owner as de Sherbinin. [3] In which year Stone included the work in an "Exhibition of One Hundred and Fifty Years of American Primitives" at The Primitives Gallery of Harry Stone, New York (4 March-15 April), cat. no. 12.
Accession Number
1953.5.26
Medium
oil on bed ticking
Dimensions
overall: 80 x 128.3 cm (31 1/2 x 50 1/2 in.) | framed: 90.5 x 139.1 x 4.4 cm (35 5/8 x 54 3/4 x 1 3/4 in.)
Classification
Painting
Credit Line
Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch
Tags
Painting Impressionist & Modern (1851–1900) Oil Painting American
Background & Context
Background Story
Flax Scutching Bee is a painting by Linton Park dated 1885, depicting a quintessential scene of American rural labor and community life. Flax scutching—the process of beating dried flax stalks to separate the usable fibers from the woody waste—was an essential step in the production of linen, one of the most important textile industries in early America. The term "bee" in this context refers to a communal work gathering, a social institution central to American agricultural life, where neighbors came together to accomplish tasks that were too labor-intensive for individual families. Park's painting captures this intersection of work and community that defined much of rural American experience in the nineteenth century. By 1885, when this work was created, the traditional practice of hand-processing flax was rapidly declining as mechanized textile production made domestic linen-making economically uncompetitive. The painting thus functions as both a documentary record and a nostalgic evocation of a way of life that was disappearing. This retrospective quality aligns the work with the broader American genre painting tradition, which frequently depicted rural activities with a mixture of celebration and elegiac feeling during a period of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The choice of flax scutching as a subject is culturally significant because linen production occupied a special place in American cultural memory. The cultivation and processing of flax had been one of the first industries established by European settlers, and the image of women spinning and weaving linen thread was deeply embedded in the national mythology of self-reliance and domestic virtue. Paintings of textile production also carried associations with the domestic sphere and women's labor, connecting this work to a tradition of representing women's economic contributions that ran counter to the prevailing ideology of separate spheres.
Cultural Impact
Paintings of agricultural work bees documented communal social institutions that were rapidly disappearing in late nineteenth-century America, preserving visual records of practices that had shaped rural communities for generations. These images also participated in the construction of American identity, presenting rural cooperation and honest labor as essential national values at a time of rapid social transformation.
Why It Matters
This painting matters as a document of American rural labor and community life at a moment of transition, preserving the visual memory of communal agricultural practices that defined generations of American experience and contributed to the nation's sense of its own identity.
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