Baltimore - Ben Richardson may have only six of his 10 fingers, but
that never stopped him from doing what he liked most: playing the violin
and indulging in the Baltimore Folk art of window screen painting.
Now almost 83 and retired, Richardson estimates that he painted
"thousands" of the unusual screen pictures, many of which still adorn the
row houses of east Baltimore, during nearly a half century from the
Depression to the computer age. He also played the fiddle at hoedowns and
square dances with groups such as the Blue Ridge Rangers and one called
simply "Damned If I Know".
And all on six fingers. He lost the other four when he was 15 in an
accident at a tin-shearing factory.
Richardson is the stuff of local legend. A burly man with searching
brown eyes, he boxed and wrestled as a teen-ager during lunch breaks at
the tin factory, while the company bosses placed wagers on his skills. ("I
hardly ever lost a fight," he says, his accent a gravelly mix of his
native England and traditional "Bawlmer.")
He married, had two children, worked as a bill collector, ran a
downtown parking lot for 17 years, crusaded for clean streets by hanging
discarded bicycle tires and paper cups on a sidewalk tree, serenaded
passers-by with his electrified violin and taught himself to play the
banjo, mandolin, guitar and jew"s-harp as well.
But he is best known for his window screen paintings. Gripping a brush
between his thumb and the finger stubs of his right hand, he created
scores of the popular pastoral scenes visible on homes here - a riverside
cabin under a bower of evergreens with moonlight shimmering over all.
The rural scene, as well as variants of it with waterfalls and
snowcapped mountains, was a staple of all Baltimore screen painters.
Manufactured painted screens enjoyed a brief vogue here and in several
other cities in the 19th century, and Baltimore artisans revived the
decorative painting as folk art in 1913.
Rural scenes were commonly requested by homeowners to decorate the
fronts of their row houses, folklorists say, because they offered a
soothing diversion from the gritty inner-city live of industrial
Baltimore.
Also, notes Richardson, the painted screens, which deflect the sun,
offered privacy for row house dwellers and in the days before air
conditioning, "you could sit around in your shorts in the summer time and
not have to worry about your nosy neighbors."
Richardson got started in the screen painting business, he recalled
when he was a bill collector in the late 1930s for a local menswear store
"and needed some more money to pay my bills."
Self-taught, he created a batch of the screens and started carrying
them on a rack on the back of his car as he made his bill-collecting
rounds.
"People like them and bought them off the back of the car," he said. In
those days, a painted screen went for about $5, he said.
Soon he was painting scenes to order: The American flag, Statue of
Liberty, Portraits of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
"There are a lot of Catholics in east Baltimore," he said in an
interview, "so I did a lot of religious scenes…the Three Wise Men…the Lord
knocking on a door with his shepherd’s crook."
In More recent years, working out of a studio he made himself behind
his home in South Baltimore, Richardson painted pictures of subjects from
Elvis Presley to the Mona Lisa, charging $30 to $35 each. He suffered a
stroke three years ago, "and that stopped me," he said, so he retired.
Born in Essex, England, in 1904, Richardson emigrated to the United
States and settled in Baltimore when he was 14. Trained by his father to
be a brick mason, he soon found he preferred music and screen painting.
Between pictures and playing engagements, he worked at various tasks,
including the parking lot where he earned a reputation as the curmudgeon
of cars, snapping impatiently at motorists unable to stay within their
assigned yellow lines.
"Either you know how to park or you don’t," he was quoted in a 1950s
Sunpapers article as snarling at an unfortunate driver. "If you don’t, get
offa my lot. This ain’t no shopping center."
Several window screen artists are still active in Baltimore, though
their numbers have diminished from the heyday of the 1930s and 1940s, said
Elaine Eff, folklorist and director of the Baltimore Painted Screen
Society. She estimates there were more than 100,000 painted screens on
houses in east Baltimore 50 years ago, when the city’s populations was
much larger. About 3,000 are left she said.
Of Ben Richardson, she said, "He is not a minor light in the screen
painters’ hall of fame. He’s a major figure… His most important
contribution is that he passed on his skills. He taught others, and some
of them are still painting."
