Merle H. Glick
1111E WORLD OF OLOF KRANS
In 1846, many hundreds of immigrants from Sweden settled on the fertile prairie of Central Illinois, populating a village they named Bishop Hill. It was a religious communal society under the leadership of strong-willed laymen who chose to flee the state church of Sweden. The great migration from European countries to escape poverty, lack of opportunity, or religious persecution is common to the ancestry of millions of Americans. But the settlement of six hundred like-minded citizens from one area of Sweden was not the ordinary case. Hard work, strong leadership and singleness of purpose produced a community that rose swiftly in terms of economic success. By 1850 when Olof Krans arrived from Sweden as a thirteen year old boy with his parents, the Bishop Hill Colony, in only four years, had built large buildings, developed thousands of acres of fertile farm land and were producing grain and textiles in sufficient quantities, beyond their own needs, to sell to outsiders. Olof Krans toiled in the fields along with the hundreds of men, women and children who had their assigned tasks in this communal society, which thrived for about fifteen years. He joined the Union Army for a brief period ofservice in the Civil War (Fig. 1), returning to the Bishop Hill area to operate a mobile photographic studio long before he began to paint portraits. Painting of a different kind, however, was Krans' occupation for over fifty years. He lived in several communities near Bishop Hill supporting his family with his "trade" as a commerical paper hanger, a painter of houses, stores,farm buildings, and signs, and a decorator of walls and woodwork. With no known academic training, he must have sensed a need to adapt his skill as a utilitarian painter to create scenes of Colony life while he could still remember his own boyhood experiences and could tap the memories of surviving Colonists. Although
many of them were photographed in later years, (providing a source for Krans' portraits) there were few photographs of Colony operations during the communal era before the Civil War. Stories and legends could be written down or repeated, but how it looked remained only in Colonists memories. Not much is known about Krans' earlier interest in "Art for History's Sake:' as George Swank entitled one chapter in his book Painter Krans. Swank, a local historian, and a Galva, Illinois printer has compiled the only book devoted to the artist's life and works, although there are several published histories of the Colony which invariably use Krans' paintings as illustrations. "Father had a strong sense of the historical:' is a quotation attributed to the artist's son, but few paintings survive from the pre-1890 period, if, in fact, there were many. An auditorium curtain.commissioned for the community center in Bishop Hill is the earliest known major work, entitled Bishop Hill in 1855. Done in 1895, it was a grand 15 by 10 foot panorama of the village for which he received $65 plus a testimonial supper and a gold cane. A smaller canvas of this scene was done in 1911(Fig. 2). The popularity of this mural must have motivated the artist to paint other historical scenes for the approaching golden anniversary of the Colony settlement. It was a long, hard summer of spare-time painting in 1896. We do not know in what order they were done, but in historical sequence, his Bishop Hill 1846(Fig. 3)shows the temporary living quarters where colonists suffered their first winter in Illinois. Earthen dugouts,lined with logs, provided dormitory-like space for 25 to 30 persons in each unit. Krans' pleasant scene of orderly rows of cabins and leafy trees must have reflected old settlers' typical memory ofjust the pleasant things, not the hardships. Malnutrition and disease caused the
1. Olof Krans in His Union Suit, OlofKrans, 1908. Oil on canvas. 36 x 22 inches. Private collection. Krans served eight months in the Union Army, receiving a medical discharge in 1862.
The World of Olof Krans will be on view at the Museum of American Folk Art galleries from September 29,1982 through January 3, 1983. Merle H. Glick is a trustee of the Lakeview Museum of Arts and Sciences in Peoria, Illinois. He collectsfolk art and lectures on Illinois history. This Exhibition was made possible in part by funds from The Caterpillar Foundation and The Swedish Council of America.
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