Recently a woman brought us a framed portrait of her grandfather, Harley R. Barstow, Sr. in his World War I uniform. The picture, which most people would casually misidentify as a photograph, is actually what is called a charcoal crayon drawing. Such drawings were quite common and popular in the last half of the 19th century and up through World War I. In fact, such images are iconic for World War I veterans. We see them with the forlorn faces of the young men whose names became American Legion posts.
Mr. Barstow was among the fortunate ones who returned from “the war to end all wars” and lived to the age of 75. He was married and widowed once and married again. He had two sons and a daughter in his first marriage. He worked at Maddox Table Company most of his life.
Our donor obtained the picture from her mother. It is in better condition than most framed charcoal portraits. It has the typical oval shape and convex glass. The paper such drawings were done on was almost always bad from a museum person’s perspective, acidic and tending to become very brittle. The backing in the frame is worse. The artist typically worked from a usually poor contrast or blurry photographic print of the face. He could enhance the uniform if the original photo was made in uniform, but if not, he drew in a standard of stereotype rendering.
We have some additional information about Mr. Barstow. We started by consulting our Veterans Listing Project cards and the Post Journal Death Files which our volunteer, Wayne Leamer, scanned by agreement with the Post-Journal. The file, atypically, lacked an obituary. Sunset Hill Cemetery provided a copy on request.
