Post Office Mural – Nashville AR

Description

John T. Robertson painted this 11’11” w X 5’2″ h oil on canvas mural, “Peach Growing” for the Treasury Section of Fine Arts in 1939.

From the University of Central Arkansas: “John Robertson was commissioned for $660 to create a mural for Nashville, Arkansas as a result of competent designs submitted in the Interior Department Competition. The figure kneeling on the left of the composition is a portrait of Mr. Bert Johnson, who is considered by Nashville residents to be the father of the peach industry in Arkansas. Nashville’s mural is the only Arkansas mural that included a portrait of an Arkansas native. Robertson did not visit Nashville to collect primary material, but instead sketched an orchard near Bernardsville, New Jersey.

The mural depicts the three most significant steps of peach cultivation. On the left, two figures are planting the beginning of an orchard. The kneeling figure is a portrait of Bert Johnson, the father of the Arkansas peach industry. In the center, two figures are spraying the dormant peach trees, the most dramatic and symbolic of the intermediary steps involved in peach cultivation. On the right are two pickers, harvesting the fruit. In the extreme foreground are field boxes of peaches ready to be brought to market.” (cms.uca.edu)