Folks, meet Harriet and Leon. They are on their way to work. They live in Boston. It’s 1941. The world is at war. It’s winter.
Allan Rohan Crite, who painted Harriet Jackson and Leon Bailey, wanted us to see them. Not stagily set up in his studio, not even at home, but on the street. In their own neighborhood.
In fact, “Harriet and Leon,” which can be seen at the Boston Athenaeum, is one of the last in a series by Crite collectively known as the “neighborhood paintings.” The painter, who was 97 when he died in 2007, saw himself as a kind of artist-reporter, presenting Boston’s predominantly African American Roxbury and, in this case, South End communities in, as he put it, “an ordinary light, enjoying the usual pleasures of life with its mixtures of both sorrows and joys.”
Allan Rohan Crite’s “Harriet and Leon,” 1941. On view at the Boston Athenaeum. (Allan Rohan Crite; Gift from the artist; Boston Athenaeum)
Harriet and Leon evidently know a bit about both. But that’s nobody else’s business. Their gazes are fixed ahead. Harriet’s expression is slightly more fixed: Her eyes convey something like alarm.
Leon, meanwhile, has heavy, half-closed lids, suggesting some unknown, possibly unconscious measure of acceptance. Whether it is acceptance of the biting Boston cold, of the size of his paycheck, of the state of mid-20th-century race relations, or of fate more generally is for you to decide. Leon doesn’t care what you think.
What I like about this picture — so modest, plain-spoken and unpretentious — is that we’re not the only ones watching Harriet and Leon. Two little children are also watching them, and, like us, they’re appraising. Their dual presence gives the picture its precious slyness, and a peculiarity that, the longer you look, starts to bend your perceptions.
The kids are trying to make sense of the world. That’s what children do, right? Their gazes linger just a little longer than feels socially appropriate because they’re eager to figure things out.
They cannot know what Leon and Harriet know — they haven’t lived 40 or 50 years. But the effort they put into trying bends their bodies to the side, like reeds in a moving current.
This sideways movement is echoed by vectors elsewhere in the picture: the boy behind Leon, pulling the sled. The perspective line of the receding street. The posture of the man carrying boxes of ice in front of his truck.
Everything’s bending in the direction Harriet and Leon are heading.
Harriet and Leon. Who are dragging the world with them.
Great Works, In Focus
A series featuring art critic Sebastian Smee’s favorite works in permanent collections around the United States. “They are things that move me. Part of the fun is trying to figure out why.”
sebastian.smee@washpost.com
Sebastian Smee is a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post and the author of “The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals and Breakthroughs in Modern Art." He has worked at the Boston Globe, and in London and Sydney for the Daily Telegraph (U.K.), the Guardian, the Spectator, and the Sydney Morning Herald.
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