Henry CHURCH

A self-taught rock carver and painter from Chagrin Falls, Ohio, Henry Church carved a bas-relief rock carving, of which the most famous is the 30 foot-high "Squaw Rock", which can be seen from the Chagrin River. He was a blacksmith by trade who had a reputation for eccentricity; a deeply religious man and spiritualist, as were his parents. Twenty years before his death, he carved his own tombstone, "an angry lion with green glass eyes"...representing the Peaceable Kingdom referenced in the Bible. Church preached his own funeral sermon, which he pre-recorded on a gramophone cylinder that was played at the burial service in the local Evergreen Hill Cemetery. The trustees of the cemetery had opposed the tombstone being installed claiming it was too ugly, and the fight lasted for 20 years until Church threatened to live forever. Apparently the trustees gave in, but likely they regretted it because the sermon on the gramophone was "a scathing denunciation of his enemies, especially the trustees of the cemetery. Among his painting subjects were monkeys, still lifes, portraits and landscapes. Unfortunately Church's daughter burned many of her father's paintings because she lost her home and had to move into a space that had no room for housing her father's artwork. She had taken care of them for thirty years and justified her actions by saying "Nobody liked them. Nobody wanted them. I didn't want them to fall into the hands of anybody who wouldn't take care of them. So I did what my father would have done. I destroyed them. All but these few." He avoided the Civil War by paying four-hundred dollars for a replacement. After the War, he painted a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and give it to the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic. However, they kept it in the cellar. "He seems to have derived his ideas in part from Victorian advertising posters and trade cards of the period 1861-1889"....his "Self Portrait" of the 1880's borrowed heavily from an 1865 poster for Wolcott's Instant Pain Annihilator" and his now famous "The Monkey Picture" of 1895-1900 from a coconut advertisement. - Sam Rosenberg, Sidney Janis "They Taught Themselves. American Primitive Painters of the 20th Century", 1942, and "American Painters of Three Centuries", Lipman/Armstrong, 1980, pp. 175-181.

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