Portrait of a Swedish Immigrant
by MM Anderson
Title
Portrait of a Swedish Immigrant
Artist
MM Anderson
Medium
Drawing - Graphite Pencil
Description
This graphite pencil portrait on pale gray paper depicts my paternal second great grandfather, Sven Persson (aka Swan Peterson) who was born in 1837 in Sweden and immigrated to the United States in the eighteen eighties. I have been told that I resemble him. I based this portrait on a photograph taken around the nineteen twenties. His eyes were closed in the photograph, maybe against the bright sunlight. I chose to leave them closed in my drawing because I feel it gives him a contemplative air.
I have written this short story to go with the artwork:
The old man gingerly lowered his body to sit upon the worn wooden porch step in front of his small clapboard house, hands folded upon his knees and his wife of more than five decades by his side. He was dressed in his good Sunday suit and an incongruous pair of soft house slippers. When the photographer released the camera’s shutter, the man was captured looking down as if wearied in spirit by a long life as a farmer on the Iowa prairie. It was a humble pose for a humble man who had arrived from across the sea long years before to settle his family in a strange land.
Nearly one hundred years after that image was taken, the man’s great-great-granddaughter, an artist, created a portrait in graphite pencil using his likeness from the photograph to bring the past alive in an era when it is all too often forgotten. She has been told that she resembles her ancestor. Perhaps his story did not end in 1934 when, upon his passing, he joined his wife beneath the dark Midwestern soil.
Uploaded
July 4th, 2017
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