Eric Sloane was born February 27, 1905 in New York
City. Early on, he took up an interest in art, spending
many hours with neighbor and noted type designer
Frederick Goudy. From Goudy, at an early age, he learned to hand
paint letters and signs.
His first clients included aviation pioneers. Many of these flyers
had the artist paint identifying marking on their airplanes. In
exchange for teaching him to paint, flyer Wiley Post himself taught
the young Sloane to fly. The young man fell in love with clouds
and the sky, themes that would be central to his work for the rest
of his career. Amelia Erhardt bought his first cloud painting.
Sloane is regarded now as the finest cloud painter of his generation,
and his largest cloud painting graces an entire wall of the Smithsonian
Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.
Young Sloane ran away at age fourteen and became a sign painter.
He worked his way across America, painting signs on barns, buildings
and stores, all the time gathering images of a country in expansion.
One of his most notable adventures was a lengthy stay with the
Taos Pueblo Indian Tribe, just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
It is generally accepted that Eric Sloane was
an artistic genius. Over his lifetime Sloane wrote
thirty-eight books. It is estimated
that he created nearly 15,000 paintings over his lifetime,
mostly oil on masonite. He completed a painting nearly every
day, often
before lunch. Later in his career, he bought back or traded
for some of his earlier work, which he destroyed, arguing
it was inferior.
While restoring a Connecticut farmhouse in the early 1950s
he began to identify with the Early American settlers. It
was at a Warren
(CT) Library book sale that he is said to have discovered
the diary of Noah Blake, an original account of New England
farm
life in
1805. With Sloane's unique illustrations and commentary
the diary became the framework for Sloane's most successful
book, "Diary
of an Early American Boy: Noah Blake 1805".
Sloane is also credited with being the foremost
authority on Early American rural architecture and Early
American tools. His many
books of paintings and drawings, and especially his "Museum
of Early American Tools", are considered the most
important historical source works on the subjects. The
Sloane Stanley
Museum in Kent, Connecticut, houses Sloane's own personal
collection of
Early American tools, as well as an exact replica of his
studio.
Sloane died March 5th, 1985, in New York City, on his way to meet
his wife for lunch. According to friends it was the only time he
was ever late. He is buried in Kent, Connecticut, at the Sloane
Stanley Museum.
